


Quickburned

by Raeliyah



Series: And the Sun Burned In Them [6]
Category: Exalted
Genre: Dawn Caste, Exaltation Story, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Jumping to the Worst Possible Conclusions, Memory Loss, Not Beta Read, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Unreliable Narrator, Work In Progress, am happy to explain what's really going on since I know it is not clear, basically everything that can go wrong does, eventually, has to do with being a proto-Righteous Devil Stylist, not that Caleb knows what they are, the Wild Wild South, vengeful ghosts doing the brainwash thing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-24
Updated: 2018-09-02
Packaged: 2018-11-04 09:23:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 29,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10988037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raeliyah/pseuds/Raeliyah
Summary: Caleb’s exaltation story - what he remembers, and what he doesn’t.Why would the gift of Sol Invictus drive a man to ride the pale horse - to suicide? Caleb’s always known that power comes with a price. He didn’t want to pay this one.





	1. Safety

**Author's Note:**

> I had to get it straight in my head what happened to Caleb that makes him so knowledgeable on the subject when he counsels Pyrrhus, later. This is the first bits of the result of that plotting. Not sure if I'll finish writing it out all the way, but, ya'll are welcome to what I have so far.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm re-uploading the story (May 28, 2018), with some new stuff, so if the comments now seem totally mismatched to the chapter content, that's why.

_ Late Summer, RY 769 _

_ The  Badlands, Southern Creation _

 

It was a damn good thing the horse knew to keep going. Dirt weren’t stupid, the stallion knew there were bad things somewhere back on his trail, and ahead was water and browse and safety. Caleb was happy to let him keep on. So long as it meant he didn’t have to be doing the thinking right this moment.

The heat was making him dizzy. Or maybe it was the sick—something had gone wrong. After he’d quit the field, Myrmecia dead at his feet and her summoned demons dissolving into bloody sand, he’d started feeling… off.

He normally healed perfectly clean thanks to a constitution blessed by the Unconquered Sun, but not this time. Green streaks were crawling up his skin from the wound the demon-queen left in his belly, and the higher it got, the worse he felt. Right now, the horizon was doing its best to curl in on itself and take him with it, so Caleb kept his eyes on his hands at the cantle and tried not to fall.

“Good boy,” Caleb murmured through a throat gone dust dry. Dirt’s ears flicked back and focused on him. He got the distinct impression the stallion was worried about him. He huffed a laugh at the thought, grabbed the cantle to keep from falling out of the saddle as the movement jarred his balance.

“There you are, cowboy,” said a familiar husky voice. Soft thudding footsteps of another beast of burden was coming up on his off-side but he didn’t dare turn to look. Thank all the gods in heaven—Lysistrata had found him, just as she’d promised months ago.

“Tell me I’m not hallucinatin’, darlin’,” Caleb said.

“No, sunshine, I’m here.”

“Thank gods, Lys. Was… ah. Was wonderin’ when you’d be a-showin’ up.” He tried to straighten up a bit, give her a reassuring salute— and his misbehaving senses promptly threw him sideways again. Caleb caught himself, again, and practically felt the  concerned face Lys was probably making beside him.

“Had a time of it, did you?” She swam into his vision, as red as the sand beneath him and the sunset off his right shoulder, and took the reins from his fingers. He sighed, letting what was left of his stubbornness drain into the earth, and hooked his hands where they’d catch him if he swayed again. He could relax, with her around.

“Y’might be sayin’ that,” he agreed. His hat was jammed down on his head but even beneath the low brim he could see her now, watching him even as she took the lead from Dirt and changed their course a bit. She was looking at him with soft eyes, like he were a favorite grandpa on their deathbed or something. He dredged up a bit of a leer and shrugged a shoulder at her, where the silk sash she’d given him before was tied round his arm. “Takin’ me somewhere nice, darlin’?”

“Somewhere safe, cowboy. Just stay on your horse, and I’ll take care of everything.” She seemed reassured at his ability to quip at her, some of the fire coming back to her as her camel picked up the pace.

“Y’always take care o’ me good,” Caleb said, and sagged into his saddle. He’d just rest, some. Now that she was here. Rest was all he needed, anyways.

* * *

 

He remembered very little of the path Lysistrata led him on, his mind a heat mirage of wavering lucidity. It was all heat and grit and red sand, the repetitive thumps of his horse’s hooves, the slower beat of his own heart pounding in his ears.

For a thrashing panicked moment, as ropes wound around his wrists and chest to pull him secure against his own saddle, he felt Mezir coming to kill him again, to choke him on rope and dust and by a horse’s galloping pull.  He lost that battle before it even started, lapsing away into drowsing red darkness by Lysistrata’s comforting murmur in his ears.

* * *

 

He came back again for a time, in shaded coolness and dampness caressing his face. Caleb grabbed for the water and alertness with both hands, and while he managed to grab hold of one, the water evaded his grasp when his arms refused to work for him, lying traitorously limp.

“Here, sunshine,” came Lys’s voice, and her scent of jasmine and firedust  settled over him, a reassuring blanket, as she lifted his head and put a flask to his chapped lips. “Not too much.”

“Where?” He managed, once Lys took the water away. He could have drunk a whole river dry, but queasiness and long desert experience warned him away from more until his innards had a chance to adjust.

“Nowhere they’ll find you,” Lys said. She was combing her fingers through his hair, her gaze directed towards the light from the tent’s opening instead of him. Caleb sighed and focused on her touch instead of the pain burning in his injuries. The red darkness snuck up on him and snatched him down again.

* * *

 

If it had been an escape, a comfortable floating nothingness, he might’ve stayed in the red dark. Sure, it set all the sharp pain of the stab in his belly and the other battle wounds at a hazy distance, made thirst and hunger and dirt ignorable, but it wasn’t a pleasant place to hang in.

For one, it was as hot as an essence vent, and the part of him which still clung to rationality figured that was the fever he was pretty sure was burning him up; for another, the red dark clung to him and dragged him down like thick tar until he could barely think, and not in the sort of pleasant alcohol-hazed way he’d have preferred.

Caleb was aware—vaguely, in the easily forgotten way of the half-asleep—of things happening around him in Lys’s tent: of other voices coming and going, of her jasmine-and-firedust murmurs over him, words forgotten immediately along with his ability to reply, of a bitter herbal taste in his mouth and tugs at the edges of his wounds.  He grumbled at the last and tried to move away, and Lys’s fingers through his hair sent him relaxing back into the grip of it. Sun in Heaven, he just wanted to sleep.

It was the sound of Lys’ distress—and he still wasn’t sure exactly what had convinced him it was distress he heard, not anything else—which sparked him into some kind of motion.

Caleb thrashed his way free of dark and back to immediate habitation of his skin, sucking in a hissing, painful breath through a mouth full of dry cotton and the taste of hoof parings. His joints were full of hot lead and it felt like sand had finally, after a lifetime in the South, worked its way underneath his skin. Every movement felt gritty and abrasive.

Half an adult life spent deep in various bottles let him gather together enough thoughts through the fever haze to keep them in line and make some sort of sentence out of them. He regretted coming back for a full span of heartbeats, until he heard Lys sniff and the rustle of cloth from nearby.

“Cryin’ over me, dove?” he managed to croak.

“Of course not, cowboy,” she snapped instantly, but her voice wavered. Caleb persuaded the creaking mechanisms of his neck to turn so he could spot her, vision swimming only a little; her eyes were red and her usually flawless cosmetics smudged.

Last he remembered it had been late morning, sitting on Dirt’s back across the endless track of Southern desert. Now it was evening. Through slitted eyes he saw he was under canvas in Lys’ extravagant tent, with padded mats and cushions under him and pierce-work oil lamps throwing geometric patterns of colored light and shadow across the heavy fabric hangings.

“Good. Cuz I’m fine,” he said in a dry rasp, and accepted the water she put to his lips in grateful sips. Good to hear the lies out of his mouth were a little convincing. He was about as far from fine as he’d been since his exaltation. “An’ otherwise I’d have to go beat up whoever made ya cry, an’ I’m gonna need another ten years o’ sleep before I’m ready fer that.”

He was trying to grin, to provoke the same from her with a smart-ass remark, but the only smile she gave him in return was so small as to be nonexistent, and tinged with heavy concern at that, if he read her right.

“Big words, hmm?”

“Ain’t gonna die, darlin’.” The words echoed back to him in blood-tinged deja vu. Someone had said so, said he might die, while he lay there dumb. “Jus’ need ta rest. I’m fine.”

“Sure you are, sunshine.” She trailed fingers through his hair.

It felt clean, he noted through fever-haze as she did so, free of grit and falling in strands rather than sweat-greased clumps. And the familiar weight of his gunbelt and layers of clothing were likewise gone, leaving him in clean small-clothes and not much else under the light blanket. Ah, well, Lys had seen it all before.

Lys rolled gracefully to her knees and stood up, oblivious to his realization. “Think you can eat something?”

He could, and did, though it galled him to need Lys’ help to do so, and to take care of other pressing bodily needs after. She helped him lie down (more like collapse) onto a camp bed; a more comfortable, cooler, and as importantly, a safer from scorpions bed than the pile of cushions and mats on the floor he’d been occupying.

He doubtless used up more than his fair share of grace, trying to look as though he didn’t need the help he definitely did, and he lay like a wrung out rag after. The red dark clawed at the edges of his vision, a thousand ants ready to smother him back down and he grabbed at Lys to keep himself anchored.

“Lys… talk t’me. Please. Need… focus on summat else.”

“Alright, Caleb.” If he’d been a little more alert, the use of his actual name and her quick agreement might have worried him a bit. But she settled at the edge of the bed beside him, arranging him with his head in her lap and one hand on his chest, the other stroking his hair, nails against his scalp—she could keep on doing that forever, he was never going to get tired of it. “You’ll want to know what’s happened since I caught up with you?”

“Yeah, sure. Anything. Could be brothel gossip. News. Don’ care.” He hid his face against her leg and sighed into the touch along his hairline. He fixed his attention on her voice.

“Hmm. Well, it’s been two days since I got you here, three if you count today being nearly over. Twelve since your fight with the demon summoner, as near as I can make out. Sophie—Sophiastrata, one of the Veils, a healer, you’ve met her—” which accounted for the fact he could have sworn there were two of Lys at one point while he wasn’t quite awake, all the Veils looked nearly identical— “...She came and took a look at you, stitched you up. She says you’ve got blood poisoning, which is why you feel so terrible.”

“Joy,” Caleb muttered. He’d known Myrmecia was filthy in a moral sense, it figured the claws she’d gotten into him were too.

“Clearly something special to lay out a Lawgiver,” Lysistrata said. She traced her fingers down his neck, from just under the jaw, and he flinched away from how surprisingly raw the skin there was and the pain even Lys’ featherlight touch evoked. Had the green streaks gotten that high? No wonder he burned.

“She was somethin’, alright,” He sighed—no use brooding over it now, Myrmecia was well and truly dead. Caleb turned back so he could watch Lys’ face in the dimming lamp light.  “Twelve days. Huh. I lost track somewhere between last I saw ya and Myrmecia, Lys, what’s the date?”

“Coming up on the end of Resplendent Fire, sunshine. The twenty-third. Which makes keeping you cool enough your brain doesn’t fry more than you’ve already done almost impossible.” 

The number stopped his concentration in its tracks, overridden by the sound of snapping bone echoing through his skull. The memory of a horrified scream, the fire and thunder which followed drowned out every other sense for long moments, forcing even the fever and ache and pain away in favor of purely mental trauma. Twenty third. Resplendent Fire. Almost when it… When it happened. His mouth was full of ash.

Lys was calling his name softly. Her fingers carding through his hair brought him slowly back out of those memories, and it was only as he relaxed bit by bit he realized he’d gone as stiff as an iron spike.

“Caleb. Would you tell me, now? What happened since I last saw you? Why they’re calling it Shattered Earth?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I c’n do that.” Anything to think about something other than the impending grisly anniversary. His fingers trembled, even flat against the blanket as they were. He needed… “Gimme my gun, please, Lys.”

“There’s nothing to shoot here, cowboy.”

“Not aimin’ to shoot ‘em, dove.” She slid out from underneath him after searching his face for Sun-knew-what, and he followed her movements as she crossed to the tent’s center pole. His gun belt hung on a hook there, Medicine Man slung beneath in its own sheath, and she took one of the pistols from the holster.  And, maddeningly, stopped. “I jus’ wanna have ‘em in hand, Lys. Steady me. Unload it if y’like. Please, Lys.”

“Well, since you whine so nicely.” She cracked the barrel and pocketed the handful of bullets, handing him the pistol. A breath went out of him; he put the barrel back absently as she settled back underneath his head. The gun was another anchor, this one much deeper and older than Lys, and he felt the trembles subside just by holding onto the heavy cold weight against his chest.

He nearly forgot what he was supposed to be doing when her fingers stroked over his brows and her voice drifted down. “Sleep if you can, Caleb, you need rest.”

“Hmm…? Naw. Can’t.” Caleb’s fingers tapped the grip of the pistol. “Rather talk t’ya, tell ya the story… reckon everything started about five minutes after you left….”


	2. Trails

_ Three months ago... _

 

He woke alone before dawn, still curled around a body no longer in bed with him. It wasn’t the first time, of course, but Caleb was still disappointed when all that was left of the red woman was her scent on his skin. The room was no longer marble and silk luxury but plain adobe and rough-woven cotton shabbiness. It was exactly what he’d expected when he’d gone upstairs with the woman last night, a place barely big enough to hold the bed. He dressed in suspiciously clean and mended clothing, shook himself to settle all his gear, and left before he could start in on whether it’d all been a dream.

He’d gotten barely two steps into Riven’s dusty streets before somebody plowed into him and bounced off like a panicked rabbit. Caleb grabbed the fellow before he ended up in the dirt. “Whoa, there, pal, where’re you goin’ in such a hurry?”

“Oh—Gods, Caleb, thank heavens. It’s you…!”

He recognized Torin as soon as the fellow looked up, even though his face and his person was streaked with dirt and grime. Torin kept flocks of rangy southern sheep on the outskirts of Riven, and could be relied upon to share his campfire and a meal, if Caleb was in the area. He hung onto Caleb’s arm with the desperate grip of one about to be washed away.

“They took her, Caleb. They took Rani and I lost the trail and thank Rivela you’re here—”

“Slow down—who took Rani?” Caleb steered Torin into the shade alongside one of the buildings and had him sit down on a bench; the man was breathing like a spooked horse and his dark southern skin was flushed and hot.

“Raiders. Must have been. They weren’t the usual rats.” Torin gulped air and Caleb passed him his canteen. After a sip, Torin kept on, somewhat calmer. “You know the guys around here—they’re just… they’re on hard times, most of ‘em. Hell, I’ve shared a fire with them almost as often as I have you. They’d not take…”

“When, Torin? When did they take her?”

“This morning. Before dawn, from the camp on the north side of town—you know the one?” Caleb made encouraging sounds and Torin babbled on. “I went to take over a little after dawn and found her gone, but her camp thrown apart, scrapes and marks in the dirt all over. Trailed ‘em down into the wadis, but lost ‘em in the rocks.”

“I’ll get yer sister back, Torin. This is what I do, aye? An’ I’m damned good at it.” He gave Torin a wide, smug grin and clapped the fellow on the back.

He left a cautiously optimistic Torin and found his own jingling way to the stables, all his limbs feeling loose and relaxed. Suns, he almost felt like whistling. Even the growing heat of Descending Wood couldn’t smother his contentment on the walk through town down to the livery. He was well fed, well sated, and had something important to do laid out before him—there was little else he was wanting. Tracking a couple raiders and rescuing a kidnapped girl wouldn’t take him more than a week, likely.

Caleb settled for humming instead, some ivory tickler’s fancy what wouldn’t leave his head. He laughed as the sound brought Dirt’s head over the stall rail immediately on arrival. The stallion was groomed to a shine, his mane and tail braided in a neat military style out of the way and Caleb thumped the fellow on the shoulder as the stallion checked him over for treats.

“I dunno what you did, Caleb, but ol’ Dirt had a whole bevy of charming ladies fawning over him yesterday.” One of the old hands came out of the tack room at the ruckus, rubbing leather soap into a mess of straps and buckles. “Gave ‘im a wash and everything. He looks better’n’you now.”

“Yeah, I dunno what I did either,” Caleb said, pulling the halter off the peg by the door and getting it onto Dirt’s inquisitive nose with a minimum of fuss. He led the stallion out into the yard, dodging the inevitable attempt to steal his hat. “But I ain’t gonna argue! Mind gettin’ my gear out?”

The state of his tack clued him in to which bevy of ladies had groomed Dirt within an inch of his life: A braided loop of red silk fabric hung over the cantle of his saddle above his coiled lasso.

_ Ah, _ he thought, touching it and remembering smooth skin instead.  _ So this is how it begins.  _ Caleb undid the braid and looped the scarf nomad-style around his neck instead, over the blue bandanna already there. The scent of jasmine and firedust trailed from the cloth and settled over his shoulders like a priest’s protective veil of incense.

“Favor from your own lady? Thought them calico queens ran more to Venus’ blue,” the stable hand commented.  Caleb went back to tacking up his mount, poking Dirt in the ribs to get him to let out his breath so he could finish cinching up the saddle girth.

“Aye, well. Not this one. Thanks, pal,” Caleb said, swinging up into Dirt’s saddle a moment later with a jangle of spurs. He tossed the man a silver piece and turned Dirt onto the road out of town.

 

He got to the shepherd’s camp a little after noon, slouched in the saddle under the shadow of his own hat. The site was torn apart, just as Torin said, and the tracks led out towards the great sand sea to the north east. He led Dirt down to the creek bed first; letting the horse drink and refilling his canteen. The rest of his waterskins were already full from town and loaded across Dirt’s rump with the rest of his gear.

“Gonna be a long trek, boyo,” he told the horse, mounting back up. “Let’s go.”

Tracking lost sheep was a different skill than tracking raiders. Sheep wanted simple things: water, browse, shelter from weather and predators and little else. Men, though, and raiders especially, weren’t so uncomplicated. If they were stealing folk, they likely had a buyer in mind, and they’d either take prey back to their camp or straight to their buyer, aiming for silver above almost everything else. Silver, after all, could buy you the rest.

And as skilled as Torin was tracking lost sheep across the badlands, Caleb was far better at hunting men.

He found where Torin likely lost the trail, across a rocky stretch at the edge of a wadi, picked a direction out of old skill and instinct and picked up tracks again on the other side. Horse prints, not camels, thornbacks, or thoats, so they weren’t desert nomads come too far west. Horses were not the best mounts for the area (Dirt notwithstanding; more than once Caleb had wondered whether there was a bit of fire elemental back in the stallion’s bloodline), but they were quickest and easiest to handle. No fear of having your face roasted with a horse, or a spike in inconvenient places.

By the time evening came on he had a fair idea of where they were headed. Even if their buyer was out in the Burning Sea, most raiders knew was best to stay among the wadis and badlands as long as possible. The wadis were where the water was. It wasn’t much, but it was a fair sight more than nothing. Caleb trusted his instincts.

As they followed the trail well into evening, Caleb kept eyes open for signs the outlaws had left the trail and fed a bit of essence down through his hands and along the leather reins, into Dirt. It was a useful magic; lengthening the stallion’s stride, improving his wind and easing the way they already worked together.

The raiders still had more than eight hours head-start on him, and even with power, Caleb and Dirt were hard pressed to catch up. The buckskin finally stopped stopped an hour or two after sunset, head hanging, sides heaving, hooves firmly planted with his ears pinned back. He was pretty sure he could coax Dirt into another run (Dirt loved running), but it was too damn dark to see anything and it wouldn’t do anyone good if they tumbled headfirst into a canyon. He made a cold camp in the rocks, only loosening Dirt’s girth and tethering the horse within reach of a bag of feed and browse before rolling himself in his serape and falling asleep.

It took him the rest of the next day to catch up with the raiders, but by mid afternoon he could see them, occasionally, in the distance, and by early evening he could see the thin stream of smoke of their campfire.

Bless them for taking the raiders’ roads—scrubby bits of game trail and track he knew well, probably too well, from another lifetime. He left Dirt in a sheltered hollow full of browse not far away from their camp and climbed the ridge behind it, flattening down onto his belly. Hunched under his brown longcoat he blended into the rock well enough to listen from above as the fellows finished their evening meal.

“We were supposed t’get them to her highness  _ yesterday _ ,” one of them was complaining over a mug of something steaming and black and smelling suspiciously like coffee. Coffee, hell, these bastards were eating better than he was.

“We’ll get ‘em there before she needs ‘em. I could see the army before we stopped for camp, we’ll catch ‘em up by the end of the week, certain,” said another, better dressed and better armed than the rest of them. There were more than a dozen of the bastards, wrapped in nomad robes but with about as much inkling on how to wear them properly as Caleb did one of his painted ladies’ fancy gowns, probably concealing an assortment of weapons. “She’ll get her bloody victims.”

Surveying the camp found him something what made him want to snarl like Fiera’s ornery saber-tooth.  A dozen or so folk, some kids younger than Rani’s fifteen years but a fair number of older adults among them, were tied together by the neck and secured to the ground with iron stakes. There was a battered canvas sheet they had clearly been using as an inadequate sunshade and now an equally inadequate blanket, and it was as bedraggled and bloodstained as they were. The raiders had given them a canteen to share but nothing else.

Caleb was on his feet before he’d consciously made the decision. He loosed his pistols in their holsters and dragged the dragon-blue bandanna over his nose to cover his face. He took a deep breath, mentally shifting stance to something a bit more intimidating than his usual slouch, and walked to the edge of the ridge.

“Trespassers,” he called, dropping his voice an octave into gravel and clipping his words short and scary. His anima flared, blinding anyone who cared to look on him with dawn’s glorious light. “Trespassers in my badlands.”

The raiders swore and startled with gratifyingly terrified expressions as they caught sight of this apparition above their camp. A few of the braver ones scrambled for weapons but Caleb didn’t give them the time to think about it.

He leapt down into the camp, scattering their campfire into embers and floating sparks mingling with the ones in his anima blaze. God, that was going to hurt later, it was a lot further to the ground than he’d thought. Hopefully it looked intimidating, the crouch and slow straightening to fix every raider’s gaze, not stupidity repaid.

“Trespassers! You have ten seconds to leave this place or forfeit your lives. Leave the captives.”

“I don’t know who you are but—”

Caleb sighed. Talking. They were going to make this go the hard way. A few of them began advancing on him despite the fear he knew his anima was giving off, drawing swords. The leader had a flame piece and leveled it.

Caleb narrowed his eyes. Essence burned through his veins like a wildfire, stilling everything in its path. Everything slowed. Everything grayed, until the whole campsite was painted in shades of charcoal and bone.

Everything but him.

A while back, only days after his exaltation at the hands of Sol Invictus, a man-shaped spirit wreathed in golden flame and smoke had come to him in the nights. It gave him a pair of flamewands, dubbed him a Righteous Devil, and taught him a number of useful things.

How to spiral the barrels of his guns, how to turn firedust from flame to explosion and harness it in metal slugs. How to shoot properly—to aim with his heart, and kill with the eye. How to make a stand and draw the unrighteous as moths to his flame…

How to leash the hungry ka of sinners he’d killed and direct their ire to his purpose against those as deserving as they had been.

The gold smoke of his anima turned black and oily, thicker than blood, curling around the guns at his hips in wisps and tendrils. He could hear them, if he tried, the whisperings of foes gone by, seeking penance through justice dispensed.

They strained at his will like a pack of hunting dogs with the scent of prey, impatient for him to mark their targets in this step outside of time.

He has only heartbeats, but it would be enough. More than enough. The pistol glimmered with his sunfire essence, waiting, ready. The Devil-spirit’s words reverberated down the bones of his hands.  _ Aim with your heart, kill with your eye, pull the trigger with your soul. _

Red colored his vision, condensed into marks on the targets he counted out: one, two, three, four, five, six—his gloved hand tightened on the grip of the pistol.

Time resumed.

Six shots rang out, so close together they sounded like one. Six bullets wreathed in golden fire and black smoke struck out, and six raiders crumpled to the ground, neat holes burned through their skulls. The screams of the damned—six new hungry ka added to his tally—ricocheted through his head with the crack of the shots.

There’s a reason some called him Wraithshot.

It would come back to hurt, later, when he let himself calm—those hungry ka calling for other people's’ sins. When he’ll need to settle and leash them in harness with the rest. But not now. He can’t afford to let it tear him now, he’s got a job to do.

Two of the raiders—smart fellows—dropped their weapons and fled into the night, swinging into saddles and beating the reins against their mounts’ flanks in desperate fear. He drew the other pistol, got off a shot and heard a yelp of pain, and then the last five stupid fellows from around the campfire decided they’d better rush him.

When it was over, he was the only one left standing; a little singed around the edges and banged up good, but every raider was laid out around him, dead or unconscious. Mostly dead, they being more stubborn than the usual lot.

Forge sparks still rained down from the bonfire that was his anima, but he hardly noticed.  Gods, he hated drawing on the power so hard. Fiera loved it, went all banshee fierce and exultant like her tribe at war when the light ripped loose, but it just made Caleb gray; as though it drained every feeling out of him until he was nothing but walking Death.

Wraithshot. It fit.

He kicked the leader’s flame-piece into the remnants of the campfire and headed over to the captives. They cowered away from him, cringing together into one huddled mass, away from the effect of his anima. His heart broke a little more at the sight of it but he kept the stone-mask. Only Rani—brave Rani, bless her—held her head up, though she wouldn’t meet his eyes. Good. He didn’t want her to recognize him here, anyhow.

His anima painted stark black and gold shadows across the campsite, and he said nothing as he flipped a knife he’d palmed from a raider and sunk it into the dirt in easy reach. Then he backed off, as none of them showed any inclination to move while he loomed over them with _ fear _ seeping out from his footsteps, and hunkered down on the far side of the fire.

“You are free,” he told them, still using the cold voice as they stirred. “Take their horses. See that star? That’s the Wheel. Follow it, ride south of west until you reach the river. Go upstream to town.”

Rani—gods, he was going to praise her to high heaven whenever he got back—was the first to the knife, and got everyone free, shepherding them just like her dimwitted sheep. Desert girl she was through and through, and he smiled behind the bandanna as she took every drop of the raider's water.

There was something strange about all of them. Rani, he knew, her da was one of the small gods who reign over the badlands, and his essence marked her. The rest…

Oh, hells.  _ Victims _ , the bastard said. They all had the essence of the south, in fire and lava and sand and small gods tied up in them. It glittered through their veins as they rode off, and Caleb watched the former captives in horrified realization.

Caleb turned his gaze out north, and east after they were well and gone, after he’d stripped the raiders clean of every useful scrap. There was a glow on the horizon which had nothing to do with the Pole. The army. Moving through his territory. Taking his folk for  _ sacrifices. _

Oh, those bastards were gonna die.


	3. Circles

_ Now _

Lysistrata listened to her one-time lover’s narrative trail off, and was grateful the lamps had burned low enough that neither of them could see much of the other’s expressions. The colored shades painted him in orange and gold and blue, smoothing the lines of pain and exhaustion from his face.

Caleb stopped talking. She heard the pistol grip groan as his knuckles tightened on them. “I couldn’t save ‘em, Lys. Got a lot of ‘em, all from that camp, but there were others… still…”

“They’d  _ all _ be dead if you hadn’t helped, cowboy, stop cheating yourself. Drink.” She felt the chest beside her for the cup, filled it and helped him sit up to drink, as she had been every time he paused in his story. Once he’d drained it, she refilled it and made him drink again, along with a dose of the medicine Sophiastrata had left.

“Enough t’make my teeth float,” he said, handing back the cup and shifting restlessly, half-leaning on her.

“In plain Flametongue, please.” Caleb’s collection of idioms and turns of phrase occasionally mystified even her, despite a childhood and a significant percentage of her adulthood spent in the South.

“Means I gotta piss.” He swung his legs over the edge of the large camp bed and swayed, a ragged edge to his voice that could either be irritation or exhaustion. Given the way he shook his head, probably both, and he probably regretted the terse phrase. Caleb had very few mean bones in him, and none of them he liked showing. She left him briefly to retrieve the pot from its corner and set the earthenware utensil within reach.

“Do you need help?”

“No, thanks, I think I c’n handle myself.” He said it without looking up at her, and she could feel his struggle to remain flippant and cheerful.  _ Pobrecito. _ She judged him able, barely, and left the tent so he could manage his pride in peace.

It was almost brighter outside than under canvas; the Pole of Fire flickered off to the south, and brilliant streamers of essence danced in green and violet and gold light from there across the dark skies to the east and west, bounding in Creation against the Wyld which beat against it like a rocky shore. Luna was waxing full, her silver light drowning out the stars and bathing the oasis of their shelter in shades of blue.

Dirt and her camel stood nose-to-tail in the small corral, not even flicking an ear as she approached. The poor buckskin’s ribs were still showing far too much; it was clear he’d been through as much an ordeal as his rider.

She summoned a pattern spider out of essence and stardust, stroking the creature’s spindly limbs as it materialized. It raised the first pair in question and she murmured to it. The creature dipped in acquiescence and dropped off her hand, vanishing in spun threads of starlight and fate to carry out her commands.

Caleb was already half-asleep and slumping by the time she got back and had dealt with the utensil. Lys tucked the blanket around him and smoothed the hair away from his face. He was still too pale under the freckles and tan, she could tell even in the low light. And he burned so, under her hand.

Today’s lucidity had been welcome reassurance from the half-conscious delirium he’d been in since she’d found him. The green streaks of infection had not yet retreated, inching up from his collarbone, and she had no hopes the days to follow would be so good. Not until this battle of illness was decided. And this was a battlefield she, Chosen of Battles, could not influence more than any other mortal. It was infuriating.

“Rest, sunshine,” she murmured when he stirred.

“…better if you’re here,” he said, slurring the words and groping for her hand. Lys let a smile touch her expression briefly and slipped into bed beside him (it was her tent, after all, her and the Veils’; the bed was plenty large enough for two). He slung an arm over her hip, buried his face in her shoulder, and slept.

* * *

 

_Three months ago, more or less..._

 

It took him two weeks to find the army’s trail. He’d’ve thought such a large group would make an easy to find trail, except he was looking in the wrong places. It wasn’t until he stumbled across the ritual circle he realized his mistake.

He’d taken Dirt down into a canyon, hunting out shelter from an encroaching Firestorm—a cave, a way-station, or at least lower elevation where the Pole-fueled storm would pass overhead without roasting either of them where they stood. The bottom of this canyon was studded with odd rock formations, fanned and branching and riddled with holes like sharp-edged stony trees eight or nine times his own height.

When they started joining together, melding into arches and honeycombs which could have comfortably housed bees the size of small yeddim and his skin began to hum with the sheer power of the place he figured out he’d stumbled into a demesne.

He kept going down into the center of the place, where the demesne’s power was strongest and would offer the best protection against the roil of fire-essence sweeping out from the Pole.  And there the circle lay.

Thirteen pillars of dark volcanic stone had been driven into the softer sandstone here, arranged within a carved ring as deep as his hand, enclosing an area as wide as four of Dirt standing nose-to-tail.

A body hung from each pillar.

Caleb dismounted at a run to the nearest, telling Dirt to guard. He had a sinking feeling he knew what he’d find, but it didn’t stop him hoping. Best case being there were still folk left to rescue, not thirteen corpses.

He bounced off an invisible wall before he’d even gotten to the pillar. Not just bounced—thrown, hard enough to land him on his rump with the breath driven out of him and leave him with a bloody nose besides.

“Well now, that’s just plain rude.”

The wall extended upwards farther than he could feel from the carved circle—a circle filled with old, dried blood, he noted now he was close enough to look. Didn’t bode well for the ones inside.

Caleb was no kind of savant. He could tell this whole mess was something occultic, and terrible business aside (what kind of benevolent magics call for the sacrifice of living folks, anyhow), but it was a knot he hadn’t the tools to unravel. All he had was a sword… or in this case, fists.

“Since we’re dispensin’ with proper manners already, how about this—” Essence flooded his system and lit up the mark on his face even through the hat, gilding the surface of the wall and showing him his own reflection. Did his eyes really go white all the way through when he drew on the Sun?

Caleb made a fist; essence collected in his knuckles a heartbeat before he slammed them into the wall with his whole body behind the blow. The wall rang like a bell beneath the iron of his hand.

“Let—” Another bruising hit.

“Me—” A third.

“In—!”

On the fourth punch, the wall split with the sound of tearing cloth and Caleb stumbled inside through ripped shreds of yellow essence. 

“’Smore like it,” Caleb muttered, dusting himself off. He prowled around to the front of the nearest pillar.

Dead. Definitely dead. He closed the eyes of the body—an older godblooded man, stripped to his smalls and hung by his feet from the top of the pillar. Long, precise cuts had laid open the man’s veins to the air and his skin had been scraped of the blood that had surely coated him, as though whoever’d done it had been concerned with getting every last drop.

Caleb drew his bandanna up over his nose to filter out some of the scent of rotted iron and death and turned to the next pillar. They were all the same, godbloods ranging from child to ancient, all stripped and bled dry into stone channels, at least three days dead. He cut them down and laid them out with as much decency as could be managed.

“What in the name of all the Southern spirits happened…?” he murmured, hunkering down onto his heels to examine the pattern incised into the center of the carved circle.

The hiss of shifting sand behind him grew louder, gaining tone and substance until it was a sibilant voice, echoing like grating stone through the canyon’s odd acoustics. “The Lawgiver asks. The spirits answer. I answer. Malfean magics, here were.”

Caleb spun to see sand pour through the hole he’d ripped into the wall. It swirled upwards, condensing into a massive snake of sandstone and magma with a humanoid torso and a cobra’s hood. The naga-creature stretched and sank down, staying a respectful distance away. Caleb held still, but the creature made no hostile movements and Caleb soon settled, making sure his mark still burned. The image of the sun at his brow had made more than one uncanny thing out here think twice.

“Well, thank ya kindly for the information, pal. What might I be callin’ you?”

“Tithos-Wadj, am I. Undying, the Desert’s Memory.” Ah, a local god. The naga slid over to the first body, its hood flaring wide and a hand reaching down to touch the old man’s face gently. Petroglyphs—different ones than those Rivela, his own goddess friend, claimed—made patterns down the snake-body, hidden and revealed by the shifting of its scales. “This one was one of my sons.”

“Pleasure t’meetcha, Divinity. I am sorry fer your loss.” Caleb pulled his hat from his head and set it against his heart in respect. The naga nodded in return, and he took its lack of request for his own name as courtesy. Names had power. “Did you happen t’see what happened here? I mean to hunt down whoever did it.”

“Saw, did. Myrmecia, who calls herself Queen, summoned demons from the blood of my son. With all their blood.” Tithos-Wadj rose, higher than the pillars, and fixed him with a serpent’s flat stare. The pupils spun in smears of sandstone color from russet to cream and the blue of the desert sky besides, and he was hit with the god’s memories.

_ A sandstorm in miniature raged against a sorcerous barrier—Tithos-Wadj, in fury, locked away. A human woman in chitin armor the color of old blood stood at its center, Malfean essence blazing in her veins, and thirteen halfblood mortals knelt before her. _

_ One by one they stripped, as though dreaming, and one by one as her gaze fell upon them they went to the pillars. Rougher human hands, in leather and cotton of trade-road desperados, hung them high, and they did not resist as the insect-woman ran razor-sharp nails down their limbs. Blood became a waterfall, sparkling with sacrificial essence, filling channels, following patterns of portent. _

_ The ground rumbled. From the center of the circle poured demons: insects, standing like men, sharp and twisted and as black as obsidian except where the blood traced veins over chitinous armor. Every drop became another of their legion. Their eyes were faceted stones of bilious green, with no reflections save those of the Demon Queen in them. She called them, only she directed them. _

_ Her son breathed his last. Undying One lost herself in sand and rage as her anchor faded. Multitudes climbed from the hells and followed the Queen north and east, into the Burning Sea. _

“Well… dayum.” Swearing seemed to cover the situation, so he did it some more while the memories sank in. Then blinked. Tithos-Wadj was gone, and so were the bodies of the dead. Only the blood remained. Caleb had a fair idea of how much a body could hold; if every drop became a demon, from thirteen sacrifices… it must be massive. 

As soon as the Firestorm subsided, Caleb led Dirt out by the route the army of insectoids had taken, out of the demesne, into the man-killing desert. It would be mostly unfamiliar territory out there. Caleb knew the badlands; knew scrub and brush and rocks too big to be true.

This…. This was endless burning sand and waves of ridges which moved with every hour of the wind. But he knew people lived there—Fiera’s people, for one, came from here. If there were people, there was water, and where there was water… he’d manage. Caleb whistled up Dirt and mounted up.

“Alright, pal. Let’s go.”

* * *

 

_Now..._

 

Lysistrata had been awake for an hour when Kallias arrived some time after dawn. Caleb lay mostly insensible again, alternately shivering and sweating, and his skin was still too pale and clammy to her touch. To say they had spent a restless night would be an understatement. But he drank when she roused him for it, swallowed the medicine she put to him, and she counted those in his favor.

“Hello, my tempest,” Kal greeted her, enfolding her into a hug. Lys melted a little into the other woman’s embrace—Kallias had chosen to appear as the fairer sex today, as resplendent in her silk sari as he would be in a salwar—letting Kal soothe some of the stress of uncertainty away with her anchoring presence. She stepped back after a moment and held Lysistrata at arms’ length, studying her. “A little spider came and asked me to come last night. Are you certain…?”

“Yes, of course.” Lysistrata waved her hand in dismissal. “The danger is past, no need for you to keep up the charm any longer.”

“Hmm.” Kallias glanced over Lys’s shoulder to Caleb’s still form. “And the Solar lived.”

“So far,” Lys said, keeping her sigh to herself. Kallias would pick up on it far too easily, nor had the elder Sidereal ever been one to leave one’s self-told lies alone. “It could go either way yet, but we’re not done fighting.”

“As you wish then, daughter of Mars.” Kallias put her hand to Lys’s chest, and drew from her breastbone a narrow curl of script-covered paper. The words flickered with cerulean light before the entire prayer strip dissolved into motes of light and essence. Kal’s eyebrow rose; somehow managing to put an entire season’s worth of questions into the brief gesture.

“I’ve never seen a prayer strip do that before. What did it mean?” Lys’ hand went to her chest, as though she’d find some residue of the magic or a clue to its odd behavior still on her skin.

“Apparently, nothing you didn’t already know, dear one. Let’s see about your boyfriend.”

“He’s not—augh.” Lysistrata made fake strangling gestures at that towards the other Sidereal’s back, which Kallias ignored. She crossed over to the bed and sat beside the cowboy in a rustle of silk, studying him nearly as deeply as she had Lys a moment ago.  Lys found a place to stand nearby where she could watch and yet appear to be busy with some camp chore, refilling the oil in the lamps.

Caleb lay flat on his back, hands limply splayed across his chest, the blanket rumpled and halfway underneath him. Kallias’ fingers traced down the man’s ribs, feeling out where the magic had taken hold. Caleb shied away with a breathless squeak without fully rousing.

“Ticklish, are we, young exalt? Almost there…” Kal’s gentle fingers found the bone the prayer strip had curled around as Caleb’s squeak turned to a muted hiss of pain. The belly wound which was the source of the blood poisoning stopped just short of his second-to-last rib, and it was from this Kal drew forth a second prayer strip. It crumbled away as soon as it touched air, dissolving into cerulean essence in Kal’s palm.

“That one didn’t flash,” Lys said, abandoning all pretense with the lamps.

“Sometimes they don’t, no matter how much we might wish it otherwise,” Kal said. This time Lysistrata did sigh, with irritation at her mentor’s crypticisms.  Kal replaced the blanket up to Caleb’s shoulders and smoothed the fabric down, her face stilled in thought.

Lys, recognizing her teacher’s habits, sank into the folding chair she’d been using nearby. She’d been waiting for this conversation since the moment she asked Kallias to perform the ritual three months ago, the one that tied her strand on the Loom with Caleb’s. It wasn’t a real love, but it was True enough for Fate, which was what mattered against the enemy he was to face.

“Does he know? What you did for him?”

“No. And he doesn’t need to know.”

“Oh,  _ Lys. _ ”

“I don’t need your bleeding heart, here, Master.” Lys pressed at her eyes, carefully, to avoid smudging her makeup. Her mentor was one of Venus’ Chosen; of course she’d want to make a match where none could ever exist. “I did what I had to—I did my job. My personal feelings don’t enter into it.”

“Lysistrata. How long have I been teaching you? Of course they do—”

Caleb stirred and woke in a muddled panic. He grabbed at Kal’s sleeve, interrupting her before she could lecture Lysistrata (for which she would be properly grateful, after she knew he’d live). His eyes were unfocused and fever-hazed, but he stared at the Chosen of Serenities as though she were a ghost. His voice was back to the rasping croak it’d been when he first roused yesterday, and Lys cringed in sympathy to hear it.  “…Sati? Sati, you’re alive… ’M sorry,  _ manita _ , so sorry…”

“No, brightheart…” Kal said gently, easing out from under his grasp. “I’m not who you think I am. I’m not your Sati.”

Caleb’s eyes didn’t track her as she moved, and Lysistrata exchanged a worried glance with her mentor. “Sati... Thought you were dead, after. After I woke. Everyone was dead, an’ it was me…”

Lysistrata deftly switched places with her mentor, slipping her hand into Caleb’s groping one. The gun, she noted, was still clutched in the other. Caleb was watching something neither of them saw, his lips moving and his voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. Given the amount of wards and protections Lysistrata had layered on this oasis, she bet it was something from inside his own mind.

“I know a Sobeksis who owes me a favor,” Kallias murmured, her hand resting on Lys’ shoulder for a moment. “I’ll send him to you. Tell your sunshine, dear heart. Or you soon may never have the chance.”

“Thank you, Kallias.” Lys laid her cheek on the other’s hand, and then Kallias was gone, slipping from the tent.

“Caleb…” Lys called. “Caleb, what happened? Sunshine, are you there?” He looked in her direction but was clearly still seeing someone else, and she leaned forward to listen to his whispers.

“…missed you, Sati. Been too many years. ’M sorry… I looked fer ya, I did… I’ll tell ya, hmm, an’ then you c’n decide if ah’m worth… I’ll tell ya. Thought you were all dead… were an awful lotta blood, darlin’…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The charm Kal used (by request) on Lys & Caleb is "Wanting and Fearing Prayer"; a Sidereal charm that imposes an intimacy/relationship on two targets. 
> 
> http://ninjasensei.wikidot.com/charms:wanting-and-fearing-prayer
> 
> You'll see why it was important later.


	4. Alone

_ Five years ago... _

 

_ Drip. Drip. Drip. _

_ Bzzz…. _

A horsefly landed on Caleb’s hand.

He stared at it.

The creature rubbed its legs together, the bristly hairs making tiny scritching sounds over its shiny green carapace. It cast long spindly shadows over his skin as it skittered up the red-washed length of his arm, undaunted by summer heat.

_ Bzzz… _

The horsefly buzzed away and circled back, landing again on his wrist with a flick of delicate wings. He stared at them, tracing the veins through the translucent membranes. Everything else seemed trifling to the point he didn’t bother to note it—the rank stench of rotted iron and ash in the air, the scorch on the painted wood steps on either side of him, the numbness of his rump.

The horsefly bit him.

Caleb came back to himself with a yell. He jumped to his feet, shaking his arm to dislodge the vicious creature, and nearly fell down the steps he’d been sitting on. He stood there for a moment after it had gone, panting, taking stock.

Town. He was in town, his hometown even—Clearstone. The steps he stood on belonged to the temple. It was dead silent. The air was full of smoke and haze, and the square marked by wide swaths of black burn marks. He choked on the taste of copper.

It was evening. It should have been dawn. At least a whole day, vanished into nothing. What day was it? Last he remembered was riding into town with his gang at his back and the promise of a fight before them.

And a fight he’d had, judging from the state of his hands. He peeled blood-glued fingers off one by one from a flamepiece he’d been holding. White ridges showed against the red from where he’d been gripping it so hard, the etchings on the flamepiece’s grip pressed into his skin.

It wasn’t his. Wasn’t one of his gang’s either.

His knuckles were scraped and bloody - that made sense. Caleb always preferred using his fists - a brawler, not a swordsman or a gunslinger. If there’d been a fight, he’d’ve been in it swinging.

His arms were covered in gore, all the way up to his rolled shirtsleeves. He couldn’t tell if it was his, or someone else’s. He didn’t feel terribly hurt - tired, certain, and his skin was tight in places with what felt like new burns. But not injured, really. Maybe he was still in the state where he ought to be hurting but it hadn’t set in yet.

Made no sense. Caleb scrubbed at his head, realized even his hair was sticky with… foulness. What in the hell kind of fight had he been in?

_ Drip. Drip. Drip. _

The sound, a background constant, finally penetrated through to his wits. Caleb turned. Shit.

Bent backwards over the stone plinth before the temple was the ruin of a man. It was his blood, dripping off the broken curve of his skull and puddling into the pale dust of the square, had been making the sound. Black smoke rose gently from his skin, curling in wisps towards Caleb when he moved. The corpse was clothed in fine silks and an overabundance of gaudy, expensive jewelry - the kind someone wore with no taste but for impressing and intimidating folk with wealth.

The barrel of another flamepiece, a match to the one Caleb now threw at the ground before the corpse, rose from the body’s wrecked face. The butt had been smashed clear through the bone, over and over. The gore covering his arms made grisly sense.

Mezir. He remembered Mezir. Remembered a burning hatred to go along with the name, with the face.

So he’d done it then. Killed the bastard.

Caleb turned away and retched. Nothing but bile came up.

Once the spasms in his middle stilled and he climbed back to his feet, Caleb stared at the place where the body lay, and carefully not at the corpse.

Mezir’d had the blood of the dragons and Hesiesh’s fire marked the place. Scorch marks patterned the dirt, the rock, the steps of the temple, the square beyond. Smoke rose from the village, and there were still fires burning within the temple itself. Mezir had not gone down quietly, to all appearances.

And Mezir’s wasn’t the only body littering the square. Caleb spun in a slow circle, counting those caught by the Prince of the Earth’s flame and fury. Seven. Seven bodies, charred into unidentifiable ash-bound corpses. He could only hope none of them were Rattlers.

Where  _ were _ his Rattlers? He started walking.

“Shade? Sainen? Fellas? ...Anyone…?”

There was no one. He let his feet take him where they would, and they led him out of the square. The market street was empty, deserted, and not in good order either. He noted, with a dim and vacant stare which would have worried his gang on any other day, doors left hung open and goods ransacked inside the few storefronts. Broken windows.

“Baz! Sainen! Shade!” he hollered every once in awhile. Nobody answered. Not even pigeons, or sparrows, or any of the little wildlife he was used to seeing  _ everywhere _ .

He ended up in front of Zoran’s house, the little cottage at the end of the street near his own—it was a hollow shell of cinder and ash, dying fires licking up the back wall and threatening to jump to the neighbors’ places. There was blood splashed across the front porch, and a dead man still hanging half out of the front window.

_ Didn’t let ‘em take you easy, Rada, _ he thought, then had to stop and examine where the thought came from. His memory didn’t yield anything, only echoing blankness from the moment he’d mounted his horse that morning until coming to with blood on his hands. Why Rada? Why now?

“Zoran!… guys. What happened?”

Caleb shook his head and kept walking.

He kept trying to formulate a plan, to set a direction and a purpose to his wandering, but every new broken thing scattered his thoughts into the wildlands of his mind, a covey of quail flushed by ashen jackals. It was worse than a three-day drunk, and he’d had plenty of those.

He must have quartered the town in aimless search of purpose. In a back alley near the main square he found the first of his Rattlers.

They’d been executed.

Li Kibaro. Kirin. Juen. Proud Fang.

They were part of Sainen’s special trained crew, the best of them at sneaking and killing—scary bastards each and every one. And they were his. His gang. He was the one who pulled them and Sainen from gaol, gave them purpose and loyalty and they repaid it in spades.

And here they were, bent limp over their knees, the dusty ground in front of them soaked in blood until it looked black. Each of them bore crossbow wounds as well, the bolts long gone. Someone had shot them, captured them, then made them kneel and slit their throats.

Grief kicked him in the chest and knocked all the breath from him, stealing even the luxury of denial from him. It would have done no good—Caleb had never yet seen a body come back from the dead for saying it weren’t so, and he’d seen a lot of dead. More than anyone his age ought. Rage filled him with energy—how  _ dare _ they touch his people?!—but with Mezir dead as well, vengeance had already been wrought.

It was the guilt which surprised him when it snuck up on him. It filled his lungs, coated his insides in pervasive, oily smoke, smothering and choking him in certainty this was  _ his _ fault, their deaths were on  _ his  _ hands alone. Caleb dropped to one knee, a fist in the bloody dirt, and gasped for breath past the phantom noose at his throat. 

“Oh, gods, fellas… I’m sorry. I dunno what happened—” he croaked, as soon as he had breath again.

The dead remained silent.

He couldn’t meet their glazed eyes, but closed each set gently and laid them out a little better. There were no shrouds here, nowhere to send them off properly. He knelt there for a few more moments, scraping through a memory gone as thin as overused parchment for words priests used to say over the dead.

“For a man who talks as much as y’all know I do,” he finally said, slow, heavy, “I can’t find the words for ya. I’m grateful for your friendship. Wish y’all were here. Safe travels,  _ manos _ , an’ don’ come back t’ haunt me, hey? I tried t’do right by ya _.  _ I’ll remember you. _ ” _

He took a token from each as remembrance—a couple of leather cord cuff bracelets from Proud Fang and Li Kibaro, a knife from Kirin, an embellished belt buckle from Juen—climbed to his feet, and walked away. 


	5. Delirium

_ Now _

 

Lysistrata spent an unsettled day, listening to Caleb during his semi-conscious moments, and keeping up with just enough camp chores to keep both them and their mounts fed and clean. Caleb had fallen into a deeper unconsciousness in the hottest hours just after noon of the next day, leaving Lys at loose ends. She wet the fabric over his forehead and chest, trying to keep his temperature down, and fretted. Internally, where no one would notice. 

Kallias’s favored method for dealing with worrisome situations was always tea, and Lysistrata found herself falling back on her mentor’s ways. The ritual of heating water, of measuring out leaves and letting it steep, as familiar it might be didn’t re-center her as it did for Kallias. 

Still, after setting Caleb’s medicinals to steep, she took her own plain cup and curled up into  an overstuffed chair where she could keep an eye on him. 

Lysistrata had once, early in her training, shamelessly abused Kallias’ training to seduce a Chosen of Secrets into letting her into an old archive, detailing the lives of old First Age solars. The Chosen had been tutoring her in more purely academic subjects, since Lys had not had the benefit of being raised in Yu-Shan along with other destined Sidereal Exalts, and attempting to educate her as to the dangers of unchecked Solar Exalts. 

The man had been attempting to groom her for admission into the Bronze Faction, those Sidereals responsible for locking Solar Exaltations away from Creation for the last millennia, but all he’d successfully done was make her curious. 

Caleb’s story—what she managed to piece together from the disjointed, fragmented way he’d told it—matched with no other Exaltation account she’d read. Those Chosen by the Unconquered Sun exalted amidst triumph, success, and excellence. Never pain, loss, or death.

She was missing something. Or Caleb was. Delirious he might be, but she’d never known the man to lie so inventively, it wasn’t in his nature. He was nearly as good at dodging topics and questions he didn’t want to answer as she was though…when he was conscious. 

Lysistrata was making the gestures to summon a Pattern Spider to retrieve the relevant records when Dirt’s distinctive stallion squeal challenge rang out. 

There was an echoing, stuttering reptilian growl from outside the tent. 

Lys drew her knife from its scabbard in her hairstyle and moved across the tent to just beside the opening, listening.

There was another growl, shorter, more thoughtful. A mottled snout, green and black above and pale below, poked inside, along with a clawed hand at the edge of the heavy fabric. “Surem Steeltooth greets the Star-r-r-born. Kallias of Eternal Sunrise sends me.”

Lysistrata put the knife away, and with a final glance at Caleb, flung open the flaps. A sobeksis stood in her doorway. Like all of his kind, he had the body of a tall well-muscled man wrapped in scaled crocodilian flesh and a crocodile’s heavy-jawed head. He wore a kilt of immaculate white pleated linen, and was covered in gold, from a pectoral collar studded with gems to bracelets and armbands.  There was enough of the precious metal adorning his scales to buy several lavish estates. 

“Hello, Son of the River,” Lysistrata greeted him, bowing just slightly enough to not cause offense to the proud spirit.

“I owe a debt,” the sobeksis said, ducking his head to enter at her gesture. He filled the tent, standing straight, and took care lest he hit lanterns hung around the space. “I am to pay it to you. What would you have of me?” 

“A man under my care lies gravely ill. Help me heal him. Please.” 

The sobeksis followed her gaze to Caleb. Reptilian faces were not suited well to conveying emotion, if indeed he had any, but she watched Surem’s throat pouch flare and he nodded. He sat down at Caleb’s bed and tasted the medicine she’d been giving the gunslinger, then gently made the man roll onto his back, examining him from head to toe.

Lysistrata leaned over Surem’s shoulder, but she knew the extent of Caleb’s injuries without looking. An assortment of nasty but minor burns and scrapes, fading bruising especially around his ribs—and the stab wound in his belly. 

Lysistrata had distributed a fair number of such injuries to others. When Sophie had first uncovered it Lys had been both professionally contemptuous and personally relieved at the attacker’s sloppiness. It was nasty, certainly, but they had not managed to pierce clear through into the abdomen. It only dragged upwards across several ribs and stopped short of the third, trailing a comet’s trail of green supernaturally-enhanced blood poisoning streaks. 

Finally the sobeksis placed his palms on Caleb’s head and chest, his head cocked to one side, listening. 

“This, the fever is too high,” Surem declared. He scooped Caleb up in both arms. The gun was no longer in the solar’s limp fingers, lying abandoned on the bed. 

Caleb was not a small man but the sobeksis carried him as though he were a young child, and Lysistrata was stunned for a moment by how lean he looked in the spirit’s arms. And how pale he was, even under the southern-burned tan, as she followed the pair outside into the light.

Surem strode into pool at the center of the oasis where Lys had pitched her tent. With another stuttered growl and commanding stomp of his foot, the flora nearest him bent and fluttered and bowed to lean out over the water and create a small pocket of shade. Surem laid Caleb down there, submerging him almost completely in the water, and beckoned Lysistrata over with a jerk of his head. 

“Hold him,” the sobeksis commanded. “I will return. Further medicine to retrieve. He must cool if it is to have effect.” 

“If he is to live, you mean,” Lys said, slipping into the water heedless of her chiton. She settled into the cleanish sand in the shallows and hauled Caleb’s head into her lap once more, keeping his face above water. 

Surem shrugged. “Exalts, always react differently to disease. This one clings. He might shrug it off without help, might not. Coolness is better either way.” 

He poked and prodded until both the water and Caleb was arranged to his satisfaction, gave another stuttering growl, and straightened. Lysistrata noted his kilt was still bone dry and hanging in perfect pleats, even where it was ostensibly under the water. Spirits. 

The sobeksis turned without further commentary and dove in a flat graceful arc into the center of the pool, disappearing without hardly a splash into the depths. 

Caleb had not stirred during the entire matter. He was a hot dead weight on her lap, only the restless movements of his eyes beneath his lids and the uneven rise and fall of his chest under her hands proving he was not, in fact, dead. She draped the edge of her sodden dress across his forehead, letting the cool water make rivulets through his hair. 

“Don’t you dare die on me, Caleb Shai Mayberry Raith. Stay, stars take you, stay right here,” she told him, and summoned a pattern spider.


	6. Omens

_ Five years and one day earlier…. _

 

As omens went, the fact that the first thing the Rattlegorge Riders saw coming into Clearstone was a swinging corpse was not a great one. It was the local sheriff, by the armor and the symbol on the shoulder of the breastplate. A typical move for Mezir, the warlord the gang had come to the town for in the first place. 

Truth be told they’d been in Clearstone for a while now. The town didn’t have so many folk, but it sprawled; an old dog spreading out to sun its bones in the sun. This part of town was the closest Clearstone had to “dense”—the original settlement, smaller houses and buildings built close together for mutual protection against land, mortal, and immortal alike. 

Caleb had spent the better part of his childhood running through the back-streets and alleys here following his two older brothers. When his Pa hadn’t dragged caught the three of them and dragged them out by the ear to the ranch they worked further west, that is. 

Two larger open spaces anchored each end; the temple and provost’s house on the north and the guildhall (not the Guild, just Clearstone’s local craftsmen and traders) and storefronts to the south. There weren’t walls, exactly, but a ring of posts around the edge where they hung lanterns, or festival banners on occasion, or wards when times were real bad. 

It was from one of these poles the body hung, half-tangled in an old, tattered pennant. Familiarity nagged at him as Caleb rode closer to the hanging body and studied its slack features. Realization dawned at the same moment Zoran’s anguished shout rang out from behind him. 

“Rada! Rada!” Zoran was already down off his bay gelding and running, his brimmed hat forgotten in the sand. “They got my sister, boss! Rada! Help me get her down; I gotta get her down - guys!” 

Rada. Caleb was swinging down from his saddle only half a heartbeat behind Zoran, intercepting the younger man before he could get too far. “Zoran, lissen t’me - wait -”

Rada. Rada had been as close to him as his own sisters, and the two of them had been flirting around young love before Caleb had left town with his brothers and Zoran. There was a soft spot in his heart for Rada, but a glance at the rest of his Rattlers stalled the incipient grief in its tracks. They had a job to do. He couldn’t afford to go to pieces, and neither could he allow Zoran to do so either. 

His buddy was struggling in his grip, throwing wild swings, trying to get away, straining towards the gently swaying body. Zoran spewed curses in every language he knew, Flametongue and worse, at Caleb, at Mezir, at the gods—“Boss, my sister! They strung her up—lemme go—”

Caleb shook him, and when that didn’t work, hooked a foot behind Zoran’s and knocked him flat on his arse. The yelling stopped as Zoran caught his breath, and Caleb hunkered down over him. “Lissen. Lissen t’me, Zo. This ain’t the time. I hear you, believe me, I do - but we gotta job t’do. I need you here, now, with me, you got it? Grieve later. Work now.”

“Caleb…” Zoran said, gray eyes wild. He subsided into pale but determined, grabbing at Caleb’s arm till his fingers turned white. “Caleb, it’s Rada…”

“I know. I know, pal. Work. Now. Grieve. Later. We both will, alright? Drinks on me.” Caleb shook him again, just a little, and stood up, hauling Zoran up after him. He strode back over to the body, and had just opened his mouth to order her cut down, when a flicker of motion where there ought to be none caught his attention. 

A sentry thudded open the door of the nearest bungalow, the rickety plank construction rebounding off the wall with a shudder. Two more emerged from the house across the road. “Oy. You lot, what’re you doing here?”

Caleb turned on his heel and sauntered towards the sentry. He caught the eyes of Istalki and Shade, his left hand in the gang; they fell into step just behind him. “Howdy, fellas. We’re here on business, y’might say. Got a delivery for yer master.”

“What kind of… delivery?” 

“Well, fella, it’s like this,” Caleb said, leaning forward and scratching the side of his chin in the manner of a man about to discuss something indiscreet. The sentry, who had come within speaking range, now took a few steps even closer. Caleb glanced over to see Shade, finger-combing her violet hair over her shoulder, enticing her own target nearer with the flutter of eyelashes. He leaned in, pitching his voice even lower. Conspiring. “We was hired to bring somethin’ special and, ah, well -”

Caleb’s arm moved and his fingers flickered. The sentry grunted, eyes suddenly wide, and crumpled to the ground. Caleb hastily stepped back, sidestepping the spray of heart’s blood with practiced ease. To either side, there were two other nearly identical thuds as  newly made corpses fell to the ground. Each sentry’s own knife were embedded up under their ribs. 

“There’s the delivery,” Caleb finished. Being light-fingered was so useful, palming things from folks’ own gear. 

He heard steps on the roof. Caleb turned, snapped, “Sainen!”

“Three steps ahead, boss.” Sainen brushed Caleb on the shoulder as he passed. He and his squad were already bounding up to the roof ways, chasing the fourth sentry Caleb hadn’t seen until the fellow made a break for it. 

“Awright,” Caleb said, confident Sainen had it well in hand. The man and his smaller crew were a mite different from regular folks, but Sainen had been his right-hand since Caleb broke him free from Gem’s gaol and a death sentence a number of years ago. Caleb had an inkling they’d been child-slaves trained as assassins, or worse, but he’d never pried. He swung back up onto his little paint mare and pointed at Rada. “Now - Cut her down, boys, an’ show the lady some respect. Put these riffraff up instead, hey?”

Zoran was first up the pole after her, and as soon as he was sure the kid wasn’t going to dissolve, Caleb turned his mare in a wide circle. Sentries coming out of folks’ houses were mite concerning. Especially three of them, so close. No, four—Caleb glanced up at the rooftops where Sainen had gone. There was no flutter of blue from returning victors.

Had Mezir’s folk been warned? 

Possibly best to go on as though they had and start being a mite more sneaky. But first—

Zoran had pulled his blanket from his pack and was wrapping his sister in it as a shroud. Caleb shook his head; kid was going to regret it when the nights turned cold, but he didn’t have the heart to tell him so. If they made it out of this, they’d have enough for as many blankets as a fellow could want.

He left half the crew under Shade’s direction dealing with the other corpses, accepted his tithe of coin and a cigarillo from Koba, who’d been rifling through the dead men’s clothes, and led Zoran and the other half of the crew around the edge of the town. 

They had time for this. Caleb’s gang might grumble and complain and threaten to murder him when he rousted them out of camp long before dawn, but it let them adapt to whatever they found better than others. Gold and silver will do a lot to make up for early mornings. 

Striding Moon, with the best eyes and a quick little claw-strider barely bigger than she was for a mount, skittered out ahead. If there were more sentries, she and Big Mouth would spot them first this time and take care of it. Caleb spared a moment of pity for whatever poor soul had the job of watching the town’s graveyard.

Baz and Joyous Granite helped Zoran, digging a grave with short-handled camp shovels at the edge of the yard. Caleb stopped just inside the yard’s rickety fence. 

His Pa was buried here. He was struck by the name on the stone marker, its edges still crisp with the recentness of its carving and not sanded away by time, from across the yard.  The last words he’d ever exchanged with Huck Raith had been, well, full of vinegar to put it politely, and a few hairs short of a brawl. He doubted the man’s ghost would be any more favorably inclined towards him now than it had been before his death. Caleb twitched the brim of his hat further down and resisted the urge to scrunch his shoulders up. 

“Boss,” Moon said from right at his elbow.

“Jay feathers, gal, make a little more noise afore ya sneak up on a man in a graveyard,” Caleb said, flicking his knife back into its sheath. 

“Sorry.” She grinned, unrepentant, and shoved Big Mouth’s head away from where it was nosing under her arm in search of food. “But, boss, there’s people around still. Townsfolk, not Mezir’s swords. Not a lot of them, but still. Some.” 

“Where?” 

Striding Moon pointed. Caleb cursed under his breath.

“Lemme think a moment.” Caleb stuck hands in his pockets and fiddled with the set of brass knuckledusters there, watching the proceedings in Zoran’s family’s part of the yard. They were nearly done; Zoran was laying his sister down and Tasso stood at the foot of the dug out hole, head bowed and palms extended as he spoke in somber tones over the dead. Baz and Granite were quiet on either side.

Those three were a interesting lot to be in a gang like Caleb’s, or any gang, really, this side of the badlands.  Baz and Granite were mountains of muscled flesh, and Tasso an Immaculate-trained martial artist—they were scary folk to meet anywhere. And yet they were, all three, some of the gentlest souls he’d ever known. None of them wanted to fight; poets and scholars’ hearts the lot of them. No one ever told them no though either when Caleb sent them to “explain” matters, and they much preferred explaining to beating in heads. They’d have any townsfolk safe away in minutes. 

By the time they’d patted down the last shovelful of dirt and Zoran had scratched Rada’s name into a rock with the tip of one of his knives, Caleb had made up his mind.

“Baz, you and Granite and Tasso go sweep the area. Get the women and the kids out if they ain’t already - they got no place here today. Out of the town if you can, down into the old mining tunnels below otherwise. Moon, show ‘em where.”

Baz whistled an affirmative and ambled off, tapping Joyous Granite and Tasso as he passed. Moon swung up onto Big Mouth and led the way. 

“What about the rest of us, boss?” 

Caleb slung an arm over Zoran’s shoulders and pulled him in close; the kid was red-eyed and grim, streaked with sandy dust and dirt. The rest of this half of the gang—slightly less than a double handful, with the other four and Sainen’s crew gone—gathered in around him. 

“The rest of us…” Caleb jerked his chin in the direction of one of the houses Moon had pointed out to him. It was a very familiar two-story adobe house, once painted a pale blue that had chipped and faded over the years. There was someone still there, according to Moon, and Caleb had a bad feeling he knew it was. 

“The rest of us are gonna go say hello to my Ma.” 


	7. Prodigal

_ Five years ago _

 

Caleb’s feet took him to his Ma’s house without conscious direction from his head after. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d stumbled there, after a fight or half-awake from being out at the ranch all gorram day, and he was home, in Clearstone, the patterns of the place etched deep in his bones. The fact the last time he'd done such a thing was a dozen years ago didn't register to his body's memory at all.

He knocked his boots on the scraper by the door by reflex and set his hand to the knob. It wasn’t locked; the door had never been locked in his life. Was no need, in this town, and his Ma had always lived by the maxim that people would treat you with the same amount of trust you gave them. If you came to Ma’s door hungry, she’d feed you, naked, she’d clothe you. It might not be delicacies from Chiaroscuro or Realm silk, but you’d leave with a full belly and something on your back. 

If anyone had tried to steal from Ma Raith they’d have half the town’s kids on their tail before the day was out.

_ How then could one of Ma Raith’s boys grow up to be a scoundrel like you?  _

The accusing voice had dogged him since he found the dead in the alley. His fingers tightened on the knob, leaving bloody smears. Caleb let go abruptly and stepped back. Flutters of old memory, of his Ma threatening the brothers (always the brothers, the three of them Gabe, Jemmy, him, never Jack or the girls until Hana was old enough to rough and tumble) with slow death by skinning alive for getting dirt… everywhere. In the house. On the walls. On her floors.  

Clean. He had to be clean before he came home.

Caleb left the door still closed and detoured around to the yard in the back and the pump there. Drawing water up from the caverns beneath the town was a familiar chore, and easier than it had been before, the pitted gritty mechanism yielding to adult strength. 

“Shit, Raith,” he told his reflection in the trough. The red light of evening glittered off the water’s surface and painted a distorted circle of light on his face. “You been workin’ a slaughterhouse? Not a good look fer ya.” 

He scrubbed gore from arms and face and hair until the water ran red and his flesh was numbed by its cold, from the deep caverns where the Pole barely touched. His shirt was stained beyond redemption, and shredded up the back he saw when he stripped it and vest both; they hung in tatters. His cravat was missing entirely. 

There were half-healed wounds on his side and deep scrapes up his back he didn’t remember owning before this morning. Raw rope burns decorated throat, chest, and wrists—none of it hurt, really, not the way his eyes told him they ought. He used the cleanest bits of his shirt to scrub the blood from them, hissing as it tugged and stung. 

He ought to clean those proper. 

He seized on the thought, held it like a lifeline. A goal, something to keep him moving, one foot in front of the other until… until he could figure out something else. Until he could shake whatever fog had stolen his memories and kept him hazy. 

Ma had medicines. 

He could borrow a shirt from Jack. 

The back door into the kitchen swung open with the same creak of hinges. The creak which had forced the brothers to learn to climb in order to sneak in after dark, to slip into windows always open to the cooler breezes at night. Jemmie had been the best of them at it. 

It was dark and cool in the kitchen, sunset turning the white-washed adobe walls an orange even deeper than the tiles on the floor. The oven’s fire was dead and gone, though warmth lingered in the smooth curve of its dome when he laid a hand on it. The scent of burnt bread overpowered everything else; Ma’s morning loaf was a brick of charcoal in the back of the oven. 

_ She must be dead too, _ came the little voice, threading through the jumble of nostalgia crowding his skull.  _ Otherwise she’d be here. Singing. Mending. Reading. You brought the fight home. You killed her. _

“Might be she’s out at the ranch,” he said aloud. It sounded weak even to his ears.

Caleb fled the kitchen, the scent of abandoned bread on his heels. 

He took the stairs two at a time, ducking reflexively as he came up to the second story; he’d been tall enough to smack his head there since he was twelve. The medicines were in the hall closet right near the loft along with the linens; opening the door was yet another reminder of the home he’d left and lost. 

Mesquite, to keep away insects. Sage and juniper to keep the fabric fresh-smelling. Over it all, the crisp green of mint from a bottle Sati had spilled when he’d been seven that had never quite faded. Caleb breathed it in with a smile. 

One of Jack’s shirts was in the mending basket on the floor. There was a rip in the sleeve but it was otherwise sound, so Caleb threw it on over his head and let it hang around his neck while he reached for the medicine basket on the top shelf. 

His fingers hit paper instead of bandages, crackling a little as he fished them out from between ceramic jars of ointments and medicines. It was a packet of letters bound loosely in twine, the string frayed from being re-knotted over and over again. Jemmie’s name was on the first one. He flicked through the stack; they were all addressed to his dead brother. 

“Oh, Ma,” Caleb breathed. He picked up the basket of medicinals and took it over to the daybed, angled to catch the slanting sun still coming in the upstairs windows and spilling across the loft. There were two more packets of letters in the basket, one addressed to Gabe… and one to him. 

_ It has been a month, mijo, _ the first one began.  _ A month since you and your brothers left. I thought, at first, of course they will be back, they are always coming home when they are bored of playing at desperado. When they are hungry, or hurt, or tired of sleeping in sand. But this time you have not come back.  _

_ But I think of you always, mijo, my baby boy. I think of you, and I write, and I know you will never see these. For who can deliver letters to a boy running, a boy hiding?  _

_ It does not matter why you run. Or what you do when you are out there, in the badlands. I love you, Caleb. Always. You are my baby boy and I love you.  _

Caleb read through each and every one, though the light dimmed and his side began to ache and his eyes burned. And when he was done, if his face felt raw and his vision blurred through saltwater—well. There was no one to see, if the Boss cried. 

Morning found him still there, dozing beneath a blanket of inked love.


	8. Home

_Five years and a day or so ago…_

 

His foot was on the boot-scraper before he even realized what he was doing, and Caleb had to take a moment to laugh to himself in front of Ma’s door. Been gone twelve years and still his body remembered well its childhood habits, including the hide tanning he and his brothers would get if they neglected to clean their boots before stepping foot on Ma’s floors.

Not wishing such a tanning today, either, Caleb dutifully thumped the dust off his boots, took a deep breath, and stepped inside.

The entry hall was exactly how he remembered it, whitewashed and scrupulously clean, with a woven tapestry on one wall and the home’s single mirror opposite the door. It was shorter than he remembered it, and he had to duck his head a bit to see his own reflection. There was a bit of Pa that looked back at him, though Pa had never dressed so well nor been so freckled.

He pulled his hat off and hung it on the rack, fluffed his hair and tried to make it lay as though it hadn’t spent all morning under a hat in the sun (a battle long since lost). His vest was smooth, his cravat properly knotted—Caleb brushed a bit of imaginary dirt off the breast of his coat and stared at his reflection again.

It was no secret in the gang that Caleb was a bit vain (he wasn’t fooling anyone with the gentleman’s clothes) but it wasn’t why he preened. He wanted his Ma to have nothing to complain about in his appearance, at least, to use cleanliness as armor, and maybe lessen the condemnation he was sure to receive.

His Ma had heard the door open, no doubt, because her voice echoed down the hallway at him.

“Jack? Jack, I thought I told you to stay out at the ranch till this brushfire blows out. What are you doing?”

Caleb took a deep breath and headed towards the kitchen.

“Ma? Ma, it’s not Jack. It’s me—Caleb. It’s Caleb.”

Something shattered; the hollow crash of pottery against hard tile, and Caleb’s ma ran. Ran down the hall towards him.

Ma never ran.

Caleb tensed, anticipating a scolding or a smack or even a silent disappointed look and a heap of extra chores—the same treatment he’d received so often as a kid.

“Caleb!” Ma stopped in the threshold of  the main living space and clapped her hands to her mouth. “Caleb. You’re here! Have you come home?”

“Ah. Well. I’m here, for now. Ma, you gotta—”

All the breath was driven out of him in a rush as his Ma—when had she gotten shorter than him? And when had the white hairs outnumbered the black ones?—hugged him tight around the middle. He hugged her back, half-afraid she would break. When did she get so light, birds’ wing fragile in his arms? She was the solid pillar of… of everything he’d left. He’d seldom cause to regret it over the years, first because he was doing so much better out with a gang and later on account of how could he go back, with what he’d done to get where he was still on his hands? She’d never forgive him. He wouldn’tve.

“Oh, you’re home, _mijo_ , and that is what matters. Come, come—” There were tears in her eyes but her smile was full of light as she stepped back and held him at arms’ length. “Look at you! All dressed up. You’re a right belvedere now, are you, baby boy?”

“Yes’m, suppose I am.”

“It suits you, _mijo_. Now, come, you haven’t broken your fast yet, no? It is early—” he followed her into the kitchen, ducking a little under the door frame which had always been too short for his eldest brother and was now too short for him. “There will be bread in the oven shortly, I can make—”

“Ma, stop, please. I came to—” Caleb paused when he saw the shattered bowl and spray of scattered flour on the floor tiles, took the broom and dustpan from his Ma’s hands and set to sweeping up the mess. “Ma, there’s gonna be a fight. I came to get you away from it.”

“There’s always a fight,” Ma Raith said with a tsk and a wave of her hand. “Always a brushfire war, or raiding nomads, or clashing spirit courts.” She had a lump of dough already out on the counter under a towel; while Caleb disposed of the mess she slid the loaf into the already hot oven. Chores had to go on. “I have lived through them all, by the grace of Heaven, and I’ll be staying here, in my home, and so should you. And we all must still eat.”

“But, Ma—”

“Don’t ‘but, Ma’ me, young man.”

Caleb intercepted his mother before she could start another morning task, catching both her hands in his. “Ma. Please. Just for a few days; go out to the ranch or something. Just don’t stay here. Mezir’s involved, an’ he’s not one for holdin’ back.”

“No, _mijo_ , he is not. I know. It is why I sent Jack to the ranch, and your sisters after him, because I know that sort of man, who takes and takes and takes and is never satisfied. And he took your sisters, too, after they stepped foot outside this door.” Caleb’s professional contempt for the warlord—for the rival gang—ignited into fury. How dare he touch Caleb’s family. No matter he’d been gone; they were still his family. They had been safe. It had been Caleb who was supposed to be in danger, leaving, not them. Not Clearstone.

“Yes, I know this kind of man. But they are the instruments of their own demise, aren’t they—I will outlast him. Your sisters are stronger than they look. They will outlast him as well.” Ma Raith squeezed his hands, looking up into his face. “Stay here, Caleb. Do not walk into that man’s grasp.”

“He took my sisters, Ma. I might’ve turned away before, but I sure as hell ain’t now,” Caleb said, ignoring her tsk for his language. “I’m not twelve anymore, Ma. I got people to back me up—skilled folk.”

He almost, almost said ‘good people’ but an image of Sainen calmly flaying strips off a man like another would peel a vegetable in order to get him to talk—at Caleb’s request, even—flashed into his mind. None of them were good, anymore.

“Capable folk. We’ll get the girls back. We will. But I don’t want ya caught in it.”

“And where will you put me, _mijo_? In your pocket?”

“Nah, furthest—” Caleb snapped his teeth shut on what he’d intended to say, ‘furthest place from safe is anywhere near me’, but Ma would not find a quip like it as funny as the Rattlers might. “I’ll have a few of my people escort you to the ranch. We snuck in, they can sneak you right back out.”

Ma Raith’s expression firmed and for a moment Caleb was afraid she was going to dig her heels in—no surprise where he got his stubbornness—so he gave her his best begging-pup face. Oh, and there was the look what came out when the boys were trying to explain some bit of broken furniture or crockery—exasperation, skepticism, finally tempered and softened with love.

“Ah, Caleb. All right. But you will come home after this! And stay for awhile.”

“Yes’m, I surely will, an’ you’ll be doing this,” Caleb said, some of the worry easing from between his shoulder-blades. Shouldn’t’ve been here to begin with, she should’ve taken the girls and Jack and left at the first sign of trouble. _Where you think you get it from, stupid. Wading in hip-deep to danger with a smile? And in Ma’s case, a basket of food to give away._

The Rattlers were loitering out front, hunkered down in patches of shade or leaning against adobe walls. A few of them were smoking, cigarettes and pipes and stronger things he never poked into so long as they were still sharp and ready after. Chika was braiding the mane of her big-boned roan mare. A few of them stood lookout, crouched on the rooftops nearby, eyes out, scanning for trouble. All of them were serious, subdued even in idleness, and they all looked to him when he emerged.

Sarid, bless his pretty face, took one look at Caleb’s and offered him the last half of his cigarette. Caleb took a deep drag—

“Caleb Mayberry Shai Raith!”

—and choked on the exhale.

Right. Ma hated smoking. There would be a glare on the other side of his veil of blue smoke.

“That is a vile habit, I cannot believe my son—”

Caleb handed the cig back to Sarid and cleared his throat. The gang quit trying to hide their laughter and paid attention. “Rattlers. This is my Ma. An y’all know how to treat a woman of class properly, dontcha?”

“Aye, boss!” came the ragged chorus of replies.

“Mayberry?” Shade came up beside and checked him in the shoulder with the grin what meant he was going to regret whatever he’d say. “Fuck, Raith, no wonder you never took us home before.”

Caleb whipped around and glared at her, and the rest of the crew behind her. “I will gut every last one of you I hear that name outta yer mouths, clear?”

“Yessir… Mayberry.”

Caleb hooked a foot behind hers and tried to shove her over, but Shade danced away, still grinning like a fiend. He gave it up for lost—not a hill he was going to die on right now; when they came through the other side _then_ he’d make sure they all regretted it. He swept his glare over the rest of the gang, looking for one particular face. “Koba, c’mere.”

Koba was a tall, lanky blonde fellow, all knees and elbows and spindly fingers, but quick as a whip and an incredibly resourceful bastard. He was a recent addition to the gang, all told, having been with them for a season and some, but if there was anyone could get his Ma safe out of town, it was Koba. And he trusted the fellow to do so; the one thing in common of all Caleb’s motley crew was trust—in Caleb, in their fellow Riders, because ventures like theirs failed without it.

He would’ve trusted Sainen more with this job, but the man had his own tasks right now. Caleb spared a moment of concern for his right hand; taking out the runner shouldn’t keep a man of his skill so long, and his squad with him. Caleb huffed a breath and scrubbed at his face.

“Take my horse and get Ma out of town, quiet like. Go back to where we camped, that oughta be far enough. An’ if it ain’t, take her to the ranch. She knows the way. Come back if you can, but make sure Ma’s safe, first.”

“Aye, Boss. Howdy, ma’am, name’s Koba. I’ll be yer escort today, pleasure to meetcha, and may I say I see where Bossman gets his purty face from. Why, I’da thought you were his sister, otherwise!” Koba took Ma Raith’s hand and bowed over it with a decent impression of courtly graces.  

“Oh, a flatterer, are you.” Ma patted Koba’s hand and drew away. “Caleb’s father was much the same. The horses?”

“As you like, darlin’,” Koba swept an imaginary hat back onto his head and ambled over to retrieve the animals.

“You behave round my Ma, y’hear me?” Caleb gave the fellow a parting punch to the arm recieving Koba’s palms-out mock surrender and cackling in return.

“ _Mijo_ …Before I go…”

“Yes’m?” Caleb led his Ma into the shadow of a wall for a few moments peace; the few Rattlers who were already there scattering before him to go round up mounts and gear. They stood quietly in the shade for a moment, and just as Caleb was thinking about how almost perfect this was, if time could be still and the coming scrap ignored, with both his families—bond and blood—working together… then his Ma reached out and laid a hand on his arm, her face sombered and sad.

“I thought of writing to you, _mijo_. A hundred times, perhaps, I set ink to paper. But how do you send a letter to an outlaw on the run, hmm?”

Caleb jammed his hat further down on his head and stared at his boots.

“I do not have to tell you, this life… this what you do, the stealing, the—” Ma waved a hand in the direction of his gang, in the clear danger of them, and she did not have to elaborate, because Caleb could fill it all in by the blood on his own hands.  “… it is not being the kind of man your father and I raised you to be. I am disappointed in your behavior. But you know this, don’t you?”

“Ma—”

She didn’t give him a chance to defend himself, reaching up to cup his face and lift his gaze to hers (when had he gotten so tall anyways). Her thumbs brushed over his cheekbones, laden with memory, and her voice softened to speak quietly, only for him. “Caleb. I love you. You are always my son, my baby boy, always in my heart. I love you. This is your home, Caleb. You don’t have to run from it. Or from me. Come home, _mijo_.”

Caleb’s eyes burned. He pulled his Ma into a hug, burying his face into her shoulder, into the scent of her, of bread and sage and home. “I will, Ma. Once this is over, I will. Swear.”


	9. Blue

_Five years ago..._

 

Pain and terror woke him.

Pain, and terror, and smoke choking his lungs with heavy black weights.

He didn’t remember dreaming. And any lingering visions fled with the jerk and movement of his body as it bolted downstairs for the way out, scattering papers in his wake. He cracked his head on the stairwell halfway down hard enough to flare his vision white with pain and made it through the front door half-blind.

It wasn’t until he lay gasping in the dark street his wits returned. By then it was too late; smoke had followed him out the door and his childhood home erupted into memory-devouring inferno. Half the town behind it was also in flames, fanned by hot dry winds, and it wasn’t only the remnant of salt and shame which made his face hot and his skin dry.

Something crackled in his hand. He still clutched one of his Ma’s letters, the paper slightly damp from being held so tightly. He smoothed it out against his leg and folded it carefully, tucking it into his pocket.

Caleb watched the fire engulf the house, licking through the windows of the upper loft where he’d been just moments ago. There was no saving it. The roar of the flames sounded like accusation in his ears. _You brought this here. Your fault, your fault.... This town was better off without you._

“That’s as may be. Alright, Raith, now what,” he muttered. The elements had no answer.

Sparks popped and embers flew upwards. Caleb heaved himself to his feet and left his Ma’s house, heading west where the flames had not consumed and pulling Jack’s shirt down over his raw back as he went. Reminded of the state of his skin, the rest of his body reasserted its needs; hunger and thirst and other pressing needs clawed for his attention. One of those was easily remedied; if pissing on their ornery neighbor’s porch did nothing to halt the fire, it at least made twelve-year-old him amused.

He had a vague notion of heading to the guild hall; no one was around to object to him taking what he needed to leave town, if there was even anything left at the town’s mercantile. And even if they were about, he’d take it anyhow. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Caleb never made it to the guild hall.

A flutter of blue in an alleyway stopped him like a punch to the gut.

Only the Silver Lady’s grace even revealed it to him; a spear of moonlight through the tangle of surrounding buildings shone directly on the bit of cloth stirred by wind. It gleamed on the curve of a shoulder and limned a hard angle of jaw, and Caleb broke into a run, shouting. He knew that particular blue, that jawline, that body, better than his own face.

“Sainen! Sainen—!”

His right-hand man did not move. Caleb skidded to a stop on his knees next to his partner and knew immediately, horribly, why. The sand beneath Sainen was dark and stiff with a terrifying amount of blood.

_No, no, no no no not you too, Sainen…_

There was a broken-off haft of a crossbow bolt in his friend’s upper arm, another two in the back of his thigh, a handful of slices where more had grazed him—someone had used Sainen for target practice. He had seen Sainen dodge arrows with ease, but this...

“Sainen, c’mon, buddy, are ya with me?”

_He’s gone, and it’s your fault…_

Caleb shook his shoulder, cupped his hands around his friend’s sharp-angled face. It was relaxed, far smoother than he’d ever seen, calm and almost… content. And cold. There was no living tension in his friend’s flesh. No heartbeat beneath his fingers. No warm breath in his ears, silently laughing at some foolery of Caleb’s.

Sainen was gone.

He leaned into his friend, pressed his face against Sainen’s still chest, ignoring the stench of death and blood. Caleb’s hands fisted in Sainen’s short yukata, the cotton of it growing quickly damp beneath his face. “No… oh gods, Sainen…”

How long he stayed that way, sobbing into his dead partner’s chest, he didn’t know. Long enough when he finally rocked back, his knees protested abuse and his legs shimmered with tiny pinprick pain as the blood rushed back into them.

Caleb pushed away, set his back to the alley wall and slumped there, suddenly helpless to move. How had this happened? None of those crossbow bolts had struck anything vital. Luck—gods, Luck, where was he? Where was the rest of the gang?—Luck would have had him patched up quick. Sainen would have hated being the invalid, but he would live.

There was a darker patch in the gray of Sainen’s shirt, just below his sternum. A knife wound—a stab, deep and sure, straight to the heart. He knew that kind of wound. Made it, often.

Something else glittered in the shaft of moonlight by Sainen’s right hand.

A knife. His knife. Locust wood and Lookshyan folded steel, inlaid with green stone and silver. The knife he’d carried since Deathwatch, since his brother had been killed in a beef-headed raid ought never have happened in the first place.  
Like this one. Since Sainen was dead. His friend, his partner, his… lover. Was dead.

The blade was marred, blood looking black in the moonlight.

Acrid smoke crashed over him, dragging him down with despair and grief.

_You killed me! That’s your knife, your handiwork. Your fault… you killed me…_

“No… No! Sai… I didn’t… couldn’t have…”

He groped for Sainen, fists curling in his shirt again, as if by the action he could force strength and life back into his partner’s cool flesh. Something bit into his hand and he snatched them back. Beneath where his fingers had been lay the chip of blue crystal Sainen always wore, the one with the antelope petroglyph etched on one side. Its edge was stained where it had cut a clean slice across the palm of his left hand.

“Yeah,” Caleb said around the lump of grief which had settled at the base of throat and refused to budge. His voice came out thick and muddled. “Yeah, I got it Sai. Gotta have the last word, huh.”

He drew the chip on its cord from Sainen’s neck and dropped it over his own, then climbed slowly to his feet. The guild hall wasn’t far. His partner needed a shroud.

 


	10. Dragon

_Five years and a day or so ago..._

 

 

His Ma was well away, his gang was all together: it was time to find Sainen and his crew and do what they came here for.

Sainen found him first.

“Raith!”

Caleb’s head snapped to that rough-edged voice like a needle to a lodestone. Half a dozen Rattlers nearby followed his motion.

Sainen skidded down the curved edge of a roof, caught the support pole and dropped a story to the ground, stumbling. Caleb was there in the next heartbeat, catching him before he hit the ground. Sainen sagged into him with uncharacteristic weakness.

He looked like someone had used him for target practice.

Broken-off crossbow bolts stuck out of his left shoulder, side, thigh—he’d been shot at while he fled. The worst, though, was the way the warrior had curled in around his belly, his arm tight to his body, and his short yukata there alarmingly red. Gut wound. Sainen was a dead man walking.

“Luck! Somebody go get Luck—” Caleb hollered, and his Rattlers scattered.

As soon as they were gone, Sainen’s legs buckled and Caleb sank down with him, into the dirt of the alleyway. Sainen’s voice was strained and thin, more of the gravel in it than usual. “Raith. Raith, they were waiting for us.”

“Ssh, hold on now, Luck’ll be here in a moment—” Caleb fumbled at his belt for his canteen and offered it, but Sai waved it away with a short, terse flick.

“Shut up and listen, Caleb,” Sainen said in a voice closer to his usual clipped, business-like tones. His face was a stony mask, hiding away the pain he must surely be in—as usual. Sainen never admitted to pain. “Where’s Shade. She ought to hear it too.”

“Right here, _bonco_ ,” Shade appeared, leaning over with a hand on Caleb’s shoulder. “Luck’s a step behind.”

Sainen jerked his chin in what might have been a nod, and Caleb felt Sai’s fingers tighten on his arm. Every breath made the red stain grow larger. “Listen. They were waiting for us, Boss. I don’t know how they knew. But Mezir’s got half his army garrisoned on the north end of town, the other half camped outside in a wide half-circle. My men—”

“We’ll get ‘em back, no worries Sai, we won’t let Mezir keep ‘em—”

“Caleb. My men are dead. They died so I would have a chance to come back and tell you.” He made a grab for Caleb’s collar and dragged his face closer, glaring from beneath dark brows. “Do not let them have spent their lives in vain.”

All of them turned to look as Luck slid to his knees beside the trio, his kit already half-open and nearly spilling supplies of bandages, ointments and salves in dark glass jars, and protective amulets across the dirt. “Hey Sai, pal, wowee you got yourself messed up, don’t worry I’ll have you patched up in no time…”

Caleb tried to move out of the way, to give the dreadlocked sawbones room to work, but Sainen’s arm was iron on his. Luck just gave him a brilliantly sunny smile and worked around him, checking Sainen’s injuries with light-fingered care. He sucked in a breath when he got the gut wound.

“I know,” Sainen said. His voice had gone scraped thin again. “It is fatal.”

Caleb looked, and immediately regretted it. It was worse than he’d expected. Nothing anyone could come back from.

“Ah. Naw, naw, man. You’ll be… we’ll be fiiine.” But Luck’s eyes were wide and wild when he flinched away from Caleb’s searching gaze. He fumbled in his kit, came up with needles and silk thread. His voice broke a little. “Just a coupla stitches, alright, some holy tincture from—you’ll be back in saddle in no time—I need water, y’all, somebody—”

“I got it,” Caleb said, the words practically tripping over themselves in haste. He needed to do, to fetch water, fire, something to help—

“No. Luck, stop. I am already dead.” How could Sainen be so _fucking_ calm about it. It. His death. But he was. Calm as stone. “Caleb. Let it be you.”

The sound they all heard was Caleb’s heart, shattering into pieces.

Shade exchanged a look with Luck full of meaning Caleb pretended not to take any note of, and Luck hurriedly packed up his kit. Caleb turned to Shade and snapped, “Get the Riders together. Scouts, whole deal. We’ll ride as soon as I’m back. Go.”

“Aye, Boss.” Shade was already pulling Luck away. She bent down as she left, kissed her fingers and pressed them gently to Sainen’s forehead in benediction. “ _Ve con todos los dioses, ve en paz y luz, y sé que no serás olvidado_ , Sainen.”

“Peace, Shade. Goodbye, Luck,” Sainen murmured.

 He fell silent as they left, his head tipping back into Caleb’s arm. There was still warmth in his face, still animation in the muscles even as he lay still and quiet against Caleb while the others’ footsteps faded away.  Caleb knew he ought to be planning, figuring how to get them out of the disaster this had suddenly turned into, but all he could to was stare at Sainen, memorizing every detail of him.

“Sai… You sure, pal? This doesn’t have… we could find—” Words which usually flowed as free as drink in a dance hall from his lips stuttered and came to a dripping stop. Sainen roused again to look at him, already interrupting.

“No. Do not sentence me to a half-life of lingering for the rest of my time. Now, please, Caleb.” His gaze was steady and dark on Caleb’s and neither man’s faltered as Caleb drew his long knife and held it. The tip wavered.

“Spark,” Sainen murmured. His free hand rose, cupped Caleb’s cheek, and he shifted his voice into a terrible likeness of Caleb’s smooth drawl. “Do me this one last kindness, love.”

Caleb bit back a sound, because if he started, he’d never stop, and he couldn’t afford it. Not with the rest of the gang looking to him. This whole long day was nothing but emotions deferred, put off until he could bear to feel them. His eyes burned. He grit his teeth, leaned forward to touch his forehead to Sainen’s.

“I’ll see you later, partner,” Caleb murmured, then switched to the language he’d grown up speaking. The same he shared with Shade. “ _Mi corazón va contigo. Mantenlo a salvo hasta que me veas de nuevo_.”

He drove the blade home.

It slid up beneath Sainen’s ribs and into his heart with a whisper, the organ punctured in that single hard thrust. Sainen grunted with the impact, then sighed, all the tension and pain draining away into the dirt.

“Thank…” Sainen never finished the whisper. His eyes rolled back, his hand falling from Caleb’s face and he was unconscious in moments. He was dead in a few seconds more.

Caleb withdrew the knife—it had been Jemmie’s, once, with good folded steel and malachite inlay—in a gush of blood, dropping it into the dirt. It belonged to Sainen now; an offering to his spirit. Spirits knew he had nothing else to give. He gathered Sainen into a hard embrace, then lay the body down carefully in the shade of the wall. There was hair falling across the face; Caleb smoothed it back and closed the eyes.

He stayed kneeling a few moments longer, pummeling his brain for strategy. Nothing came. Furious grief threatened to overflow the crate he’d thrown it in.

Big Mouth’s tea-kettle whistling alarm cry rang out and was cut short.

A crossbow bolt whistled past, sliced through Caleb’s coat and shirt and embedded in the dirt. His side stung like fury. It was the best and worst distraction he could have asked for.

Caleb ran for the rest of his crew.

 

They didn’t fight so much as throw potshots to keep Mezir’s men under cover while Caleb led them to the nearest defensible space he could think of: the guildhall. Behind the big iron-bound doors was a sliver of safety, a sliver of space to think in.

His crew piled up crates and boxes and furniture behind the big doors and secured the window shutters, fixing defenses and leaving only the bolthole at the back into the cellar and the tunnels below. Caleb paced, and thought, and tried to find the path. No one commented on the spray of blood down their boss’s usually pristine shirt.  Some made signs of respect for a departed friend behind his back where they thought he didn’t see. Caleb saw. No one commented if some of the sparkling laugh had left his eyes, either, though he sure felt like it had.

They all knew their plans had gone from reckless to suicidal, with the attack, with Sainen’s report. They all looked to him to get them out of it.

“Where’s Moon?” he snapped at Shade, having done a third head-count and still coming up short. (Too short. His brain skittered right over his missing right hand and his right hand’s shadows, refusing to touch it. All he saw was red, all he could feel was fury mixed up with grief until one couldn’t be told from the other, a hard lump under his breastbone.)

 Shade was the only one of them still meeting his eyes, buffering the rest of the gang from him, and he couldn’t work up the nerve to fault her for it. “Don’t know, Boss. Got cut off before we rabbited.”

Caleb growled in frustration and scrubbed his hands through his hair. Moon was smart, she’d ghosted crews like the ones sniffing around their den before. He had to believe she was all right for the moment.

These bastards had hurt his family, bad—both of them. And he couldn’t see the path to get either of them out alive. His plans had turned to ash around him with that army here. They were supposed to be forty miles east! How had they known—

“Boss,” Shade interrupted, putting a hand out but stopping short of touching him. “Someone’s coming.”

Caleb turned on his heel. “Where? Show me—”

“Big fella on a firemane, just outside.” Shade pointed; Majarel hung off the ladder leading to the roof hatch, beckoning.

“Gimme your piece.”

Shade handed over her flamepiece without hesitation, and Caleb stuck it in his belt to climb.

The roof facade was a terrible place for a confrontation. Too open, too easy to get to from the outside, which was why Caleb had sent someone up to be lookout in the first place. Still, it didn’t keep him from wanting to blast the smug expression off the pendejo below him.  Caleb leaned out and spat with careless insult before the big man.

“Well, now, you must be another one of them Rattlegorge boys, ain’tchu?” big man said, peering up at him like Caleb was a fly he was waiting to swat. He gestured; a double handful of hard-eyed thugs gathered close from streets and alleys around the guildhall—one of them had Moon, trussed like a calf and slung over one shoulder.

“I am,” Caleb said, and was gratified to see Moon wriggle and kick at the sound of his voice, so she wasn’t dead. “Calm now, darlin’, I’m comin’.”

“We’ll see about that. Got a proposition for you an’ the rest of yer gang, if you’d be so kind. First, let’s get introductions out of the way, shall we?”

“I know who you are.” Caleb pulled the gun from his belt and cocked it. The big man watched but didn’t seem unduly concerned by the weapon. “You’re Mezir’s general. Half-brother was it? Nozorin.”

“Well, well, well. Glad to see my reputation precedes me. So let me share this with you, Rattler. You and your fellas have been cutting into Mezir’s profit, an’ that won’t fly. But you’ve been doing a damn good job of it, which leads me to our little piece of business.” Nozorin lashed his mount and the firemane danced and spun. The corpse of Striding Moon’s clawstrider slid from its rump in a boneless heap, dumped in front of the guild hall’s doors. Moon made a helpless sound and was cuffed for it.

“You can join us, turn those skills to our use and make more silver than you could dream of…. Or you can all die in this miserable little town.” A few of Nozorin’s thugs unslung crossbows and aimed them in Caleb’s direction.

Caleb felt his grin turn a little feral, a little reckless. The beginnings of a plan were starting to crystallize. It was stupid. It was suicidal. But it’d get the gang out of here alive and not beholden to anyone. “Oh yeah? Lemme get the Boss.”

He turned to Majarel, hidden behind the facade, and murmured, “Get downstairs, close and secure the hatch after you. An’ tell the crew to get the doors open enough for one person to slip through. A me-sized person, understand?”

“Aye boss,” Maj said, slipping away. Caleb turned back to the General.

“Boss’ll deal with you fair. But he’s gonna want his girl back first,” Caleb said, gesturing lazily with the barrel of the gun. He glanced down over the edge of the guildhall, gauging the distances, then dropped from facade to porch roof and from there to the ground. Not as gracefully as Sainen would have done it, but he got there nearly as quickly. “A show of good faith, like.”

Nozorin appeared to be considering the notion. “Suppose we’re square so far. Few of your boys dead for a few of mine. Take the girl.”

The thug holding Striding Moon let her roll off his shoulder and dumped her to the ground, practically on top of her dead clawstrider. Caleb clicked his tongue—now that was just cruel. Moon scrambled to her feet, her hands still tied, and stumbled backwards until Caleb was in range to grab her, pull her close.

“Play along, darlin’,” he murmured. Moon nodded around the gag and tucked her head against his chest. She was shaking like a leaf, poor gal. She and that clawstrider had a special sort of bond, near mystical, and he could well imagine what kind of havoc Big Mouth’s loss was wreaking on her. If he hadn’t been full of fury right now, fury and vengeance, he might be shaking too.

Caleb kept up steady steps backward, until his back hit the door of the guildhall. The pommel of the gun made a satisfying thump against it. The Rattlers had done a number of jobs, some of which involved playacting to one degree or another. Caleb relied on it now and hollered through the heavy wood. “Got the gal. Get the Boss!”

The door scraped open, and he pushed Moon through ahead of him. Halfway through he stopped, turned back to Nozorin, raising the flamepiece.

“I ain’t get round t’tellin’ ya my name, by the by. It’s Raith. An’ this— this is for my partner. Go to Malfeas.”

Caleb fired.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm using Spanish in place of a Flametongue dialect. Apologies if I mess it up, it's been a long time since I took classes and I'm relying on google translate.
> 
> Also, we have now reached the point where I left off _last_ time I uploaded this! Wheee it's all new from here folks!


	11. Burn

_ Five years ago… _

 

The southern half of the town was an inferno. 

As discomforting as it was, he was glad he’d not run into anyone still alive. Already it would be smarter to leave than to stay, the place was nearly uninhabitable. 

Caleb stayed. No one had ever accused him of being the wisest soul. He couldn’t shake the insistence that it was his fault, that he murdered Sainen, led his people here to die,  for betraying everyone who ever loved him—Rattlers, lovers, family—he should be dead too. 

His partner, wrapped in the first thing Caleb could find, a garishly patterned blanket Sainen would have hated, lay stiff and heavy over his shoulder.  He walked with steady, measured steps towards the temple square.

Mezir’s corpse was welcome to lie where it had fallen ( _ where he’d put the man down, beat him to a pulp, what kind of man  _ does  _ that? _ ) but damned if he wasn’t going to give his partner a decent, respectful sort of end.  Sainen deserved it.

The end of the temple square not occupied by the temple itself was dominated by the provost’s house; a little finer and a little bigger than most other homes, but still clearly a home. He passed right by it on his way to Sainen’s final resting place, and nearly stumbled across another corpse. 

_ Dead. Everyone dead, your fault.  _

He recognized the coat laid over the body first, lit by the bonfires of the rest of the town. Sarid, nearly as much a belvedere as Caleb had been yesterday, favored a distinctive cut. It was his coat. His coat laid over…

_ Hana _ .

He dropped to his knees. Let Sainen down beside him.

Discovering Sainen dead had already smothered him in grief, wrapped him until he was numbed by it. Muffled. Finding his baby sister kicked his feet out from under him. 

_ How many more before you realize?  _ Smoke curled around him in acrid, bitter veils. It slid into his nose, wrapped his throat in self-loathing and guilt until he choked on it.  _ They’re all dead. There’s no one left for you to help. Might as well follow them into the Abyss.  _

“Not yet. Work to do. Made a promise, gonna keep it. Hana, darlin’...” He could say nothing for her. There were manacles around her ankles, a slave collar at her throat… and her head lolled at an angle Caleb wished he didn’t know meant her neck was broken.  A close-range, personal sort of death—whoever’d done it…

Didn’t matter who’s hands had done it. Likely Caleb was the cause. 

“I’ll be back in a moment for ya, sweetheart,” Caleb murmured. He kissed her cold forehead and brushed her hair from her face, then climbed wearily back to his feet with Sainen once again in his arms. If he didn’t know better he would have sworn his boots were lined with lead. 

The last twenty feet to the temple seemed to take ages; every bit of him urged him to stay away, to drop everything and flee into the desert. The temple was too holy for the likes of him—c _ an’t go in there, betrayer, murderer, coward, don’t deserve t’step foot _ —and the looming portal threatened to devour him. 

“Maybe. Maybe not.” Now he was talking to himself, another sure sign of his general unsuitableness for polite company. Not that Sainen had been polite company even in life. “Sai, though. Sai. Hana. Sure as hell deserve it more’n me.”

He grit his teeth and forced himself inside. 

The southern half of the temple blazed with light, and heat. Of course, it was on fire, too, and on the way to being burnt to ash before the night was over. He and Mezir must’ve had quite the scuffle. It was a mystery, his still being alive. By all rights, no mortal should be able to go against a Son of the Dragons and come out again on the winning side. 

There was a blank spot in his memory where that fight ought to be. The whole day was a blank spot; he kept walking through the last thing he remembered, poking at it like a loose tooth. Caleb had never lost so much as a minute of memory in his life, even when he and the Rattlers celebrated a successful raid by drinking enough to kill a horse. 

“Almost, buddy,” Caleb said. Sainen didn’t answer.

Mezir must have been storing his ill-gotten gains in the temple; scattered gold and silver coins turned the stone floor into a maze of glittering scales. The heat washed over him as he got closer to the partially-collapsed nave where the altar stood, stealing his breath and burning away doubt. He lay Sainen down on the wide stone surface and went back for Hana. 

It was a little easier, bringing her inside. He laid her out next to his partner and slid down the side of the rock slab. Just a moment. Just a moment to say a prayer, and catch his breath, then he’d leave town.  Go… somewhere. Find the gang, if anyone was still alive. They had to be, someone, somewhere—right?

His boot hit something, sent it skittering away away over the stone floor with a peculiar ringing as it rebounded off coins and debris. Caleb tracked the sound until it came to a stop, and felt his breath driven out for the third time in as many hours. He knew that stamped copper bracelet. Anielka’s. He’d started a fight over it when one of the other kids had tried to run off with it—childhood taunting, he knew now, but dire insult when he’d been ten. 

“Anielka? Anielka!” 

He scrambled to his feet. There were no bodies, live or otherwise, on the untouched side of the temple. The fire drove him back from trying to find anyone in its keeping, and the shadows of what might have been people taunted him. 

_ Please let her have got out, _ Caleb prayed, though to who he didn’t know. The uncaring Heavens, Spirits of Sand and Stone, anyone. 

Someone had to have gotten out.

He had to hold on to that.

Caleb, stumbling and choking on more bitter smoke, ran from the temple. 


	12. Under

_Five Years and a day or so ago..._

 

“Found them.”

“Where? Talk to me, Chika.”

The crew had fled below ground, into the tunnels under the town via the guildhall’s bolthole, collapsing the access behind them. Caleb was reasonably sure Mezir’s folk knew nothing about the tunnels—hell, most of Clearstone’s residents forgot about them, until a Firestorm threatened. The underground portion of the town was nearly larger than the town itself, a maze of tunnels and rooms and deep shafts cut into red bedrock. They were as dark as Calibration, cut smooth and spacious and deep, and dated back to the Shogunate or earlier; a hold-over from Clearstone’s heyday as an opal-mining town.

Luck had got wind of the crossbow bolt cut Caleb had taken on the first fall-back, and finally got him to strip to the waist and sit still so he could tend it. So Caleb sat, an arm over Luck’s shoulders so the sawbones could get to the slice to stitch it, and gave orders, and bit back fear and rage and grief until his teeth cracked.

Chika, a slight godblooded woman with dark hair gone white at the ends and eyes currently blank and milky white, sat at his feet. Lightning, in tiny threads of blue, crackled in her hair. One hand held his cravat, bloody from where he’d used to to staunch the bleeding on his side before Luck had found it, the other trailing down to begin drawing in the dirt.

Chika was a Seeker—she and her spirit friend could go anywhere there was air, find anything not entombed in solid rock. She was using his blood on the cloth to seek out his sisters—anyone who shared blood with him, truly, but they’d like to be the closest.

And if they weren’t, well, he’d like to be knowing that too.

“Where, Chika?” Caleb coaxed.

“Found them, found them,” she said in a sing-song cadence. “In the big house, across the square, lots of sparkling, lots of food, lots of sad people and angry people ooh and chains. One in the big house. Two… two in the holy place, hands and feet tied, watched by men with swords and flame pieces. Oops one of them saw me have to—”

Chika blinked, her eyes returning to their normal deep brown color. “Sorry, boss,” she said in a more normal tone. The air beside her rippled, and her spirit friend—an air elemental the size and shape of an elongated temple cat only with fur made of icy crystals—materialized, gliding down to duck under her hands.  “That’s all we saw.”

“You saw plenty, Chika. You’re brilliant; take a rest. Luck, am I done?”

“I wish, boss, but like as not I’ll be patching you up again soon enough—oh you mean the stitchin’, yeah yeah yeah, go on.” Luck slathered something smelling strongly of plant and oil across the neatly stitched gash and moved off to repack his kit. Caleb slid backwards off the crate he’d been sitting on, motioning for Shade to follow him.

The eyes of the townsfolk tracked him—there’d already been a scattering of them when Caleb and the crew had come clattering in, older folk, women and youngsters, most from the temple end of town.  Caleb ignored stares both curious and warily hostile.

“I see you thinking, Boss. What is it?” Shade fell into step beside him.

“Got a plan. Half of one, anyways.” They ended up in an alcove muffled by crates and barrels of stored salt. His shirt and vest was waiting for him, along with a coat hastily borrowed from Sarid, and Caleb began dressing while Shade leaned against the wall.

“Still can’t fathom how you got her on the crew, anyhow,” Shade remarked as he buttoned the shirt. “Thought she swore back in town she’d never join a gang.”

Caleb smirked at her. “Reckon it’s my natural charm.”

“Oh, that explains it.” Shade rolled her eyes. “You slept with her. That how you keep all the gang so loyal?”

“Darlin’, you know I ain’t one t’ kiss and tell.” He shrugged the coat on, hissing as the movement pulled a little at the stitches. “Sides, I ain’t slept with you yet, an’ yer plenty loyal aintcha?”

“Course I am,” she said. He was grinning fit to split his face, and she cocked her head while presumably attempting to decide how sincere he was. After a few moments, and a deliberate drag of her gaze from his toes all the way up accompanied by a smile quite as lewd as any he’d ever given her, she countered, “Suppose when this is all over, we ought to fix that little oversight.”

While Caleb was sputtering disbelief, Shade smoothed the shoulders of his coat and tweaked the collar. “Now, be telling me this half a plan of yours and let’s make it a whole one.”

 

Ten minutes later, he was on the street and his gang was on the move.

A bit of coal dust and oil combed through his hair and Shade’s skilled hands with her face paints had him looking a whole different man. Remarkable what a bit of kohl, a change in posture, and a whole other manner of speaking could do to make one unrecognizable.

“This is a stupid plan,” Shade said from his right as they took the back streets from a tunnel entrance towards the provost’s house—and the Warlord himself. Another one of the gang, Nine Embers, huffed agreement from Caleb’s other side. “You really think he’s gonna deal with you after you shot his brother?”

“Don’t matter, so long as I stall him long enough for everyone else to get clear. I think he might. And ain’t nobody forcing y’all to come with me.” There was a set of brass knuckledusters in his pocket; Caleb turned the smooth metal over and over in his fingers like a worry-stone. If things went sour, they’d be an edge he could use. If not, well. No harm in having them. He was hoping for the ‘not’. If this worked, well, Mezir would still be unfriendly-like towards his crew, but they’d be long gone. Plenty of time to choose another battlefield, or vanish altogether. If it didn’t work… they’d be just as dead as they were now, only faster. “I coulda done this alone, you know.”

“Boss.” Nine Embers rolled his eyes and bumped Caleb’s shoulder. “We’d be even stupider if we let you. Rattlers are brothers, we stick together.”

“Or sisters,” Shade teased. Nine Embers just grinned, and Caleb felt a little hope bloom under their bickering.

“Right, then.” The provost’s house was abruptly visible, around the corner, and the men standing guard at the perimeter and adjacent rooftops focused on the trio. A Caleb straightened his shoulders and lifted his chin, adopting Sainen’s cold face and his way with words—clipped and terse. “Keep up, you two. I have business to discuss with the Warlord.”

Mezir’s guard dogs intercepted them, but between Caleb’s refusal to be intimidated and demands to see the Warlord, they were soon escorted to the house. It was a good thing Caleb had adopted Sainen’s perpetual stone face along with the voice, or he would have given them all away with a blank face while his brain stuttered to a stunned stop and failed to fathom what his eyeballs were seeing.

It wasn’t that Mezir had, in the short time he’d been in town, turned the provost’s house into a terrible caricature of a southern Shogun’s harem. The fact the house was clearly ill-designed for such a use hadn’t stopped the warlord in the slightest, and there were piles of rubble still where walls had been knocked out. It wasn’t on account of the number of scantily clad and chained pretty townsfolk serving and servicing the warlord and his officers in the sunken lounge.

No, what made his mind screech to a halt like a mule at a rattler’s den was seeing his youngest sister among them. Dragons above, he was going to need about three bottles of the worst whisky he could find to clear the image of his sister in veils and slave chains out of his head.

 Hana had looked up as he and his seconds entered in the company of Mezir’s boys and met his eyes. Gorram it, he never knew how she could tell it was him no matter what, but her eyes went wide and Caleb recognized from ten years of having her dog his heels exactly how many hundreds of words would come next. He glared at her and gave a short, terse shake of his head to hold her off.

“Ok there, pal?” Said the guard dog at his right.

No, he wasn’t gorram okay. Caleb goaded his brain back into motion like Stone Blossom’s stubborn camel—with a great deal of spurs and swearing. “Your lord has quite a taste for the… extravagant.”

“And why not? Is it not my birthright?” said the lord himself, laughing as he strolled up.

Mezir wore gold—lots of it, in large gaudy pieces chosen more for value than any sense of style, and silk garb picked for similar reasons, in red and blue and purple, and covered with embroidery. His black hair lay in oiled curls to match his short beard, both of them tipped with red like embers which might have been dye or might have been a touch of the Dragons, and his skin was reddish under the dark complexion.

And he wore, with the sort of casual ease which suggested considerable skill, a pair of expensive ornamented flame pieces at his belt.

He greeted Caleb with a staggering clap to both shoulders, hard enough to nearly force him to his knees. Caleb felt one of the hasty stitches in his side pull and a fresh surge of wetness against the bandage beneath his shirt. Shit. “Come, be welcome. Korv here says you’re the leader of them Rattler boys. Finally see reason eh?”

“Something like that,” Caleb allowed, inclining his head. “I must apologize for Raith. He… Hmm. He was not in his right mind.” Still true. He felt he was never going to be in his right mind again.

“Ah, no harm done, friend.” Mezir shrugged and glanced back at his brother, laid out in a sling chair with a more well-dressed and definitely not chained lady crooning over him. The way he favored his side gave Caleb all kinds of satisfaction. “Your boy’s a terrible shot; hope he’s got other skills for your sake.”

Caleb said, in perfect imitation of Sainen’s sand-dry tones, the first dumb thing that popped into his head.  “He is …occasionally useful.”

Unfortunately for Shade’s composure behind him, it was a phrase Sainen had used so often when referring to Caleb-as-leader it had become something of an in-joke amongst the gang.  She turned her snorting laugh into a cough, mouthing something about sand in her throat to the suspicious guard dog.

Caleb allowed Mezir to drape an arm over his shoulders and tow him down into the ring of couches and overstuffed chairs, exchanging uneasy small talk. As he got closer, Caleb saw the women were chained to a ring in the floor set in the middle of the lounge. There were a few, like the one with Nozorin, who were not, and he could only guess at why anyone’d want to hang out with idiots like these. Probably the gold.

Hana wasn’t the only one from Clearstone, but the only one who recognized him, thank all the gods. She kept watching him even while she held a platter of food for the other men and tolerated being jerked around by her chain.

“I mean to take you up on the offer conveyed through Nozorin,” Caleb said, purposefully dragging his eyes away from the offered delights and hoping Hana would get the hint and quit staring at him. He stood straight-backed and contrived to look bored while Mezir sank into a couch. “However—as I am not as stupid as some of your other conquests—I have some conditions to ensure the safety of my men—”

“Sure, sure,” Mezir said. The warlord yanked on one of the chains and drew a woman into his lap, where she fed him dainties with the same sort of care one would take with a momentarily docile canyon lion. “As long as you’re in—Sen, was it?—As long as you’re in, Sen, we can work the details out later. Siddown, relax, have a girl, eh? That’ll take your edge off.”

“My ‘edge’ keeps me alive,” Caleb said, just to keep in character, but allowed himself to sink cautiously into a chair. He tracked Shade and Nine Embers out of the limits of his vision, circulating amongst Mezir’s boys and gathering information. Shade in particular had a couple eating out of her hand in moments, but she always did love having control. She could have run the gang all on her own if she’d wanted. 

“Doll! New girl,” Mezir snapped, and Hana strolled over with less servility than was probably safe in her position.

“Yeah, boss?”

“You been starin’ at Sen here, how about you treat him nice tonight, eh?”

And to Caleb’s eternal horror, Mezir turned Hana towards him and shoved her with a boot to the backside into Caleb’s lap. Hana stumbled and nearly lost her tray, sprawling over Caleb.

“Oh, fuck,” he muttered so very quiet-like, tipping his head back a little. “Play along but for fuck’s sake get off me.”

“Mama would smack you silly if she heard you speaking so,” Hana muttered in return, then held up a dainty from her tray and said a little louder and not terribly convincingly, “Something sweet for you, Master Sen?”

“No,” he told her, and amended when she pouted, “No, thank you.”

“Something else, then?” And she leaned down over him, and Caleb carefully kept his hands on the arms of the chair, not her, did not look down, as she came close enough to whisper in his ear. “I don’t know what you’re doing here especially dressed like that, but I’m very glad you are. They took Anielka and Sati away, and Mezir keeps taunting Mama and the people left with us being chained here. Can you do something?”

“That idea has merit,” Caleb said, for Mezir’s benefit, then grabbed the back of Hana’s head and kept her close, like he was going to kiss her. Bleck. He lowered his voice in turn, “Ma’s away, safe. I know where the gals are, got folks goin’ after ‘em. Gettin’ you out’s a mite harder.  Keep play actin’. I’ll get you safe, little bit.”

“Get me home,” she said, and then fell silent as Caleb stood up and dragged her with him by his grip on the scruff of her neck. It wasn’t nearly as fun to pull on her hair as he thought it’d be when he was a kid, though the setting might have something to do with it. Hana wriggled and glared at him.

“I prefer my pleasures in private, if you’d be so kind,” Caleb said to Mezir, who was watching with a predator’s lazy attention to crippled prey, and gestured to Hana’s chain.

“Sure, sure,” Mezir said. He waved to one of his men and seemed to forget about Caleb entirely, his attention towards his own pleasures. “Have fun. We’ll talk business when you’re through with her, hmm?”

They put the chain in Caleb’s hand and he dragged her, as much by the hair as by the chain, towards the back of the house. As he got up the steps out of the sunken lounge though, he paused, as though he’d forgotten something, glanced briefly at his crew, to decide which was better for the task. “Nem!”

Nine Embers trotted over immediately, and Caleb put the chain in his hands, with a murmured, “This is my sister. Get her out.” And a louder, “Soften this one up for me; I’ll be there in a moment.”

“Lord Mezir, one thing—”

Caleb never finished his sentence.

As he turned to go back down, Hana screamed. “Caleb! Look out!”

 He caught the flicker of motion out of the corner of his eye as the knife descended. Caleb dodged backwards, but only just. His hand found his knuckledusters and came back swinging.

The fight which followed was short and brutal and nothing but quick flashes of movement, especially once Nine and Shade dove in to help. But there were too many of Mezir’s dogs, and at the end of it the three of them were held fast. Caleb’s hair was mussed, his coat ripped open and blood stained his shirt underneath where the stitches had pulled free. Hana was in Mezir’s hands, and she’d clearly been fighting too by the way the chain was wrapped short around his arm.

Nozorin stood over them, nursing a split lip. “Raith, was it. Bind them, take them outside. Keza, get my horse ready. I think someone’ll be eating dirt today.”


	13. Scored

_Five Years Ago..._

 

Caleb was in the desert.

He’d no notion of when he got there, nor of making any conscious decision to go, but there he was.

How long had he been walking? He’d lost a spell in there, somewhere—he remembered laying Sainen and Hana in the temple, remembered fleeing into predawn light… and now it was a late evening.

“Best.... not be makin’... a habit of that,” he said, through a dry throat and crackled lips. Thirst gnawed at him, slow at first, and then more insistently, but it was an ache of the body he could ignore for awhile. He couldn’t decide if he was talking to himself, the dark of the sky, the sand at his feet, or the ghosts in between.

There didn’t seem anything better to do but keep walking, so he did, deeper into the evening. His shadow stretched long before him so he had a rough idea of where he was headed—east, and a little south. His skin of his face and arms felt tight enough he reckoned he’d been walking out in the sun all day and whipped by sandy winds beside.

Good. Deserve it, said the biting-fly voices in his head. No matter how he shook they wouldn’t dislodge. Smoke must have followed him from the town; he could smell it on his clothes, the bitter scent of tar choking on him. He fancied he could even see it, curling away from his shadow as the sun set and it melted into the dimming light, billows and veils as though he was smoldering, not home somewhere behind him.

The land began to change from the rocky plains nearest Clearstone and into dunes and mountains of loose sand.

The fifth time he stumbled and went to his knees, halfway down the wind-side of a dune, he almost didn’t get back up. What was the use? Where was he going, anyways? He ought to be looking for the Rattlers.

Questions like that made the biting-fly thoughts come back. They stung him with answers he couldn’t deny, venomed words that seemed wrong but he could never quite place why or work up the energy to dispute. They drove him back to his feet and deeper into the dunes.

He kept walking. The night passed without him much noticing, putting one foot in front of the other. Moving kept him from freezing in the cool desert night, but did nothing once the Sun rose.

He kept going.

One foot in front of the other.

The day passed. Thirst clawed at his throat until it finally tired of him ignoring it, settling into a dangerous dull throb between his temples.

He started remembering.

There had been light around him, pouring from him in brilliant white-gold streamers tinged with red and violet. He had been furious, and loud in it.

The memory of rage is so strong it sends him to one knee in the sand. People had been running from that rage, screaming about demons, about the forsaken, _anathema_. He hadn’t cared, so long as they ran, ran and never came back. There was something about them, something that might have been a uniform, or a symbol. Mezir’s army.

Funny how the anger which was strong enough to send him to his knees is also strong enough to get him up and moving again.

There were other pieces. He stumbled over something in the sand, caught himself with a hand on a curved piece of some hapless beast’s bones.

But it was a flame-piece’s grip in his hand—hands—and it was less fire than spears of light coming from the barrels as he aimed and shot again and again and again. There was thunder, a ripple of it from each shot, roaring in his ears.

_“Run!” he’d shouted at Shade, covering her from Mezir’s men as she did run for the Temple. “Get ‘em out, get ‘em home—”_

_“What about you, Boss?”_

_“I’ll find you! If I ain’t dead, I’ll find you—”_

 

The last time he fell, Luna was rising. He stumbled down the leeward side of a dune until his feet caught under him and he tumbled the last four or five yards in a tumble of sand, ending flat on his back in the valley between.

_Oughta just lay here. Let the sand cover you. Die forgotten and unmourned, smothered in sand, for what you did._

He ought to. Felt fitting.

Caleb lay on his back and breathed for a moment. Whatever momentum he’d had, whatever had kept him moving forward, drained out of him into the sand. Southern Gods, but he was exhausted.

The moon overhead brightened. Its light turned sharp, then hazy and gold, and standing over him a figure coalesced.

“Was wonderin’ when I’d start seein’ things,” Caleb rasped. The words were scraping pain in his throat. “Took longer’n the last time I went without.”

The figure crouched, resolved into features he could make out. It was a man, looking like he’d been sculpted from thin gold glass, perfectly transparent. He wore one of the wide-brimmed southern hats, a bandanna over his nose covering his face and a serape tossed over his shoulders, blocking any view of the rest of him. The skin around his eyes was wrinkled from a permanent squint, and though they looked hard—he’d seen hard eyes like that before—they were not cruel.

The man chucked him under the chin with a gloved hand—he felt like he ought to have felt it, but there was no touch on his skin—and motioned with a jerk of his head. Get up. Then the figure started walking south.  
There were no stings from the biting-fly thoughts.

Caleb was used to weird things in the desert. Used to spirits and ghosts and tales of them what found lone travelers and exacted from them a grisly sacrifice. Of strange creatures and inhuman minds with their inscrutable demands. He’d developed a good instinct for things would leave him and his gang alone, and things would hurt them if they got too close.

This figure—if it wasn’t just a figment of his thirst-mad mind—didn’t feel that way. Almost felt helpful. In a kind of grumpy, sullen way. Like Jack. Like Gabe after a few drinks and two pestering younger brothers.  
Caleb dredged up strength from somewhere and rolled onto his feet. The man was waiting for him further along the valley. Farther away now, he could see flamepieces on the figure’s belt, spurs on his boots, more details which marked him as a Southern man. Caleb followed.

The rest of that night they walked south between the dunes until the ground grew hard and rocky again. Every time Caleb stumbled, every time he felt there were no more steps left in him, no way he could climb back onto his feet, the figure waited for him. The thoughts did not sting. And Caleb found another breath in his lungs and a few more miles in his legs.

Morning found him in labyrinthine pocket canyons, wind-sculpted and sand blown into fantastic eye-deceiving curves and turns. The figure stopped in a shadow and beckoned Caleb on.

“What?”

The figure pointed down a side passageway. The scent of water—faint, and metal-scented, but there—grabbed Caleb’s attention with both hands and forced his flesh to chase it. The figure melted into the dawn light and vanished.

There was a bitty spring, down near the end of the passageway—hardly more than a seep. But it flowed into a crack in the rocks and filled a deep pool. Moss and ferns and orchids grew around the edges of the crack and softened the rim of the pool. Caleb practically fell into it.

The fly bit him with Sainen’s voice. _How dare you drink when I cannot?_

He flinched back from the pool so hard he cracked his head on the rock of the opposite side of the passageway.

“Sai? Sai, I’m sorry—”

Hana’s voice stung him from the other side. _You left us, all of us, how dare you—_

“Hana, no. I had to…”

Sainen’s crew spoke in one many-throated voice, curling around in bitter smoke. _You led us into a trap, you led us there to die, you betrayed us, you should join us…_

The rest of his crew joined in, whether he’d seen their bodies or not, accusing, degrading, insulting, coaxing him into depths. Shade’s was the worst. _We trusted you and you left us to die. I should have killed you then, when you told us the plan. It was reckless and you knew it. Cocksure ass._

But it was Sainen, Sainen’s voice who turned to coaxing and pulled a choking sob from a throat still dry and screaming for the water which was right there. His voice which made promises. _Come, Caleb, come and join me. Is it worth being there without me? There is nothing left for you. Come and be with me._

“Oh, gods… Sai.” He couldn’t see straight. They were right. They were right. He shouldn’t still be here. They were…

He groped for a knife, found nothing at his belt. Hadn’t he taken one from Kirin, as remembrance? His memory was shot full of burning smoking holes but he thought he remembered that. It was gone.

There was a different memory of sharpness biting into his palm— the crystal. Sainen’s crystal. He choked on another hysterical almost-sob—well. If that wasn’t perfectly fitting. He drew it over his head on its leather cord and set it to his wrist.

Its edge was keen.

He barely felt the first slice, down the length of his forearm. Blood welled.

The biting flies in his mind quieted to a hum of expectation, and the scent of smoke wrapped him again, filling his lungs with oily bitter guilt.

The second slice went deeper, a bright cold line of pain. The third crossed them at an angle, as his grip on the crystal grew slippery with his own hot blood. It soaked across his trousers and flowed across the passageway—Caleb stared in fascination at the sheer amount of it.

He tossed the crystal aside with sluggish motions, heard it clink and shatter against rock as though it were already miles away.

He was cold.

The thump in his chest grew far away and frantic.

Sainen’s voice was crooning welcome to him, somewhere deep in his mind. It was wrong. Didn’t fit. Sainen didn’t sound like that. But he couldn’t work up any reason to care anymore. He’d be with Sai soon enough.

With every frantic beat and pulse of blood from his arm, the bright grotto grew fuzzy at the edges and retreated even further away. His boots were miles away.

He watched because he couldn’t not watch, because his head wouldn’t turn and his eyes refused to close on the stream of his blood navigate the long plain of the canyon floor, miles and miles away until it reached the pool. The red bloomed at the shore; the depths of the pool drank it up as fast as the blood pulsed into it.

The pool began to boil and spit, great gouts of water careening upwards in fury. When they subsided, a woman stood on the surface. Caleb felt a giddy smile rush out of somewhere and plaster itself across his face. Only a little while longer, and then the flies wouldn’t bother him any more. And Sainen would be there.

The woman’s skin and draped silk robes are the green-black of deep pools, picked out in rippling highlights where she was soaked from stepping from the pool. Or maybe she was the pool given form. Her eyes were black all the way across. Antelope horns of the same blue crystal as Sainen’s pendant spiraled from her brow. Her hands were tipped in long black claws, curled as though they’d like to be ripping something.

“You dare defile my waters? Speak, mortal, and tell me why I should not kill you where you—” Her eyes drop down and focused on him, as though she had not expected him to be where he was. Her eyes narrowed and measured him, boots on up. She probably found him wanting.

“S-sorry. Be gone in a bit.” He tried to give her a jaunty wave, but his right hand would not move.

All the green vanished from the woman, leaving her in tanned Southern skin and white robes, stained red at one edge where she stood over his blood. Her eyes turned blue and soft. “What are you doing?”

“Leaving.” His words felt thick and dry in his mouth.

Her hand grabbed his chin and pulled it up to meet her gaze. Blue. He could fall into that blue. He could not hold on to his thoughts properly anymore. “You are dying, Sword of Heaven.”

Well, yeah. That was the whole idea.

Caleb passed out.


	14. Stillness

_ Now… _

 

On the fifth day after Surem’s appearance, three days after he’d brought medicines, the pair received another visitor.

Caleb’s vitality had seemed to drain along with his increasingly rambling words, until he fell into a lasting stillness after telling “Sati” of the pool, the crystal blade, and his intended death. She caught him watching sometimes through glazed and slitted eyes, but he didn’t respond when she called to him. He was unconscious—sleeping or otherwise—more often than not, and Lysistrata didn’t know enough of the medical arts to know if she should be so worried.

She’d held him for a long time after the story ended. Had taken his left hand and turned it over, noticing anew the long white parallel scars running from his wrist nearly all the way to his elbow. She traced them with her fingertips, and gooseflesh rippled along his arm. “Come on, darling, don’t let the story end here.”

The second of Descending Fire dawned hazy and red, dust in the air heralding a sandstorm to come and turning the light into smoke and blood. Neither seemed to bother Iyanden as her circlemate’s dragon companion and sometime steed descended into the oasis near midday, prompting another squealing challenge cry from Dirt. Lys was washing her hands of the remnants of thick pale-yellow clay, one of Surem’s treatments from a wood demesne along the elemental’s river domain.

“Greetings, daughter of Mars,” the brilliant citrine-yellow dragon rumbled, settling onto his haunches nearby. “On behalf of my master, I bring you gifts and news from Yu-Shan.”

“And how is Caiden?” Lysistrata asked, stretching up to stroke Iyanden’s mane; a caress he accepted with grace and hooded eyes.

“Up to his nose arranging the movement of several dozen destinies left over from Tides of Shadow, so—happy indeed. Sayuri, less so, as he is seldom where she wants him. But—here.” The dragon reached into a large sash tied crossways around his chest and neck and withdrew several cloth-wrapped parcel from its folds. “Caiden sends apples from the heavenly orchards of Scarlet Hooves Shod With Swords for your friend’s mount. This box, from the Division of Secrets, and this one—”

“From Kallias, is it not?” The sky-blue sash which wrapped the last basket shut was woven in feather patterns and tied with a flat knot so neatly intricate it could only be his work.

“Indeed.” Iyanden, freed of his burden, stretched out like a temple cat with his forelegs at full extension in front of him. “My news will be less welcome than those, I expect.”

“The Judges rejected my request to bring Raith to Yu-Shan while he recovers, didn’t they.” Lysistrata leaned against Iyanden’s solid side and let her fingers worry the blue fabric of Kallias’ gift.

“Not in so many words. It is in appeals. The documentation is in the box from Secrets.”

“By the time they reach a decision, it would be over one way or another, besides. Ugh.”  

“I am sorry, Lysistrata.”

She pushed away from the dragon and patted him on the shoulder. “Not your fault. Thank you for the news, and the gifts. Please tell Caiden I owe him, and I’m happy to assist him if there’s anything I can do from here.”

“I will.” Iyanden stood, stretched, and nudged her gently. “Maidens be with you, daughter of Mars.” And then he had jumped back into the dusty expanse and was gone in moments, heading for the north and the Pole of Earth.

Lysistrata ferried the gifts inside and carefully stashed all but one of the heaven-grown apples into a wintersbreath jar. That one she took to the corral, cutting it into quarters. Caleb’s stallion had gained back some of the weight he’d lost on the deep desert journey of Shattered Earth, but his coat was rough and dull with ill-use and his head still hung lower than it ought. His ears pricked when she called him.

“He’ll be alright, brave one,” Lys told the horse as he came plodding over, drawn by the apple’s heavy sweet scent. “And so will you. Look! Not every horse gets treats from the goddess of war mounts’ orchards! Aren’t you fortunate.”

Dirt sneezed on her in agreement and crunched down on the last chunk. The velvet of his muzzle tickled as he lipped at her palm, investigating for more. Already his neck arched a little higher.

“One a day, says the goddess, so you’ll have to wait. Thanks for that, anyways.” Lysistrata scratched his forehead. Her camel was already bedded down in the lean-to structure that served to shield them, and Lys turned Dirt’s head and sent him to join her beast. The sandstorm fast approaching would not be bad here, buffered by canyon and oasis-wards, but enough to keep everyone closed in for the rest of the day. Though if the box from the Division of Secrets was any indication, she’d been sent paperwork to keep her busy while Caleb rested.

“Your horse is a brat,”she told his too-still form when she’d finished fastening down the tent-flaps behind her. “He sneezed on me. And I was being nice, too! See if I send the Veils to pretty him up again.”

There was no response.

She hadn’t expected one, really. Lys attended to the last few camp chores in silence; lighting lamps, making sure Caleb’s medicines and water were within reach and settling beside him on the bed with the gifts arranged around her.

Secrets’ box—a large flat case of dark wood, lacquered, shined, and inlaid with subtle eye-twisting patterns—contained one pulsing memory crystal nestled in thick velvet, a file labeled “Raith Event”, and a handwritten note from the Division head himself: “The scales aren’t balanced yet, child. You Still Owe Me. -Nara-O”. There was also a much thinner file with the appeals documentation she did not even bother to remove from the box.

“Well. You’re popular, sunshine. Everyone likes you enough to give me information, promptly even. Good for you.” She reached over without looking and squeezed his shoulder lightly. He was still far too hot under her hand, but not as much as when she’d first found him. “The Judges aren’t swayed by charm, more’s the pity, or I’m sure that would have been taken care of too.”

The basket from Kallias, once she’d picked the knot loose, contained mostly food—imqaret from her favorite street vendor, perfectly sweet and spiced, malatang as hot as firedust, peaches from Chiaroscuro, held at peak ripeness by subtle workings. Her master’s message was clear: don’t fail to take care of yourself as well. Lys left them in the basket where the magic would hold, and lifted out the other items.

The first was a thin sheaf of papers bound by twine, with a prayer-inscribed bead holding the knot. The bead hummed with expectation. The top sheet bore a single line of her master’s flowing script.  _ I went looking. Tell him she’s still alive. _

The rest of the sheets seemed to be astrology charts tracking a single soul’s movements across the South, and a graphite portrait of a young woman. By the shape of her eyes and the set of her chin she was clearly a relation of Caleb’s; feminine and distilled down to narrower, more serious features. It was labeled, simply, “Satianya Raith.”

“Oh, Kal. You and your bleeding heart.” Lys laid the papers aside, smoothing them until they were flat and straight, and tied the bead around her wrist before picking up the last object from the basket.

Inside the small lidded clay bowl were a number of deep amber-colored lumps, slightly sticky and redolent with the resinous conifer-and-citron scents of good incense. A curl of parchment tied to the lid explained the sweeter, essence-laden undertones of its aroma:

_ This is Akeia, sweet Lyssa. The locals gather it from gnarled trees which grow, half-submerged, on the shores of the Dreaming Sea along wood-aspected dragonlines. Those who sleep while breathing the resin’s smoke share a dreamspace while it smolders. The reveries are mostly forgotten on waking, though the emotional effects remain. The locals use it in sacred rituals to maintain harmony among extended groups, to resolve differences and unburden themselves in relatively safe environments. _

She smiled. So, it was a byproduct of Kallias’ style of live-in scholarship, then. Her master was constantly spending months, sometimes years at a time with the many cultures of Creation’s people, learning their ways of joy, of sorrow, of harmony and discord, of love and hate, to enrich his own methods of joy-bringing.

_ You know what I will suggest you do with this, and your sleeping beauty, so I will not trouble to spell it out. It will be good for both of you. And you will not have to worry about compromising your job. _

Lys dropped the lid on her master’s voice and shoved the bowl away.  

Outside, the wind began to scream through the canyon, making the whole tent shudder and ripple against its solid poles and tie-downs. The writing in Nara-O’s files wavered and jumped as the lantern light did, until she gave up trying to read entirely an hour or so later. Lys hauled Caleb upright against her and made sure he swallowed the water and medicines she put to him, then sighed, stroking his hair.

“You’d tell me to try it, wouldn’t you, sunshine?” Lys dropped her voice into an approximation of Caleb’s drawl. “‘What could it hurt, darlin’?’ indeed. With all the cares of a well-fed ranch dog, all lolling tongue and wagging tail, hoping for fun.”

He sighed, as if he agreed. Lys let her head rest against his for a moment and lost herself in the violent hissing of the wind, the noise numbing and washing over her. “It could hurt, though. It has gotten people killed, to love. Either of us could suffer for this, all too easily. It almost got you killed already and—”

Her hand was already reaching for the little bowl.

Lys prepared the incense in a pierce-work brass holder with quick and practiced motions, leaving it to heat and sputter and finally to gently smolder over a bed of small evercoals beside the bed. She extinguished the flames of the other lamps in a few moments more then stood silent in the dusty, perfumed dimness.

She climbed into bed, tucked her face into Caleb’s shoulder, and tried to sleep. Kallias was smiling at her over the rim of his tea cup, somewhere far distant, graciously not reminding her of how right he was.

The wind shrieked around them, and the tent trembled.

 

* * *

 

_ It was a void the color of her eyes, the color of Mars, the color of thick old blood. Red and dark and sweltering in rippling smoking curtains. It felt like a dream. It was a dream. The sharp scent of citron and conifer resin clung to her skin and floated in her hair, cutting across the jasmine oils she preferred. It was a dream, and she could change it to her will, and find Caleb, and— _

_ Screaming, black-bodied comets dove at her. _

_ She had less than a heartbeat to see them, to note form and detail, but they refused to be anything more than streaks with the suggestion of furious open-mouthed faces. Lys ducked and wove, but there were dozens of them. They struck at her face, at the arms she lifted to shield herself, buffeted her off balance onto her knees as she willed scarlet bladed war-fans into her hands. _

“Quit it!” _ A man’s voice rang out, commanding. The screaming apparitions scattered like leaves before it. “ _ She ain’t for you, fellas. Leave off. _ ” _

_ “Caleb? Is that you? What are those?” _

_ “Ghosts of folk I’ve killed. Or like enough. Sorry, dove—they never have played well with others.”  The ghosts fled at the voice, trailing golden threads like slipped leashes. From the smoke of their passing came… Caleb. _

_ Not dirty, scruffy, six-weeks-in-the-desert-by-himself Caleb, with feral eyes and a jackal’s wariness that always took a few hours in civilization to wear off. Not town-lazy Caleb, rumpled but clean and a little drunk on bad whisky and good laughter, surrounded by fair-weather friends. And the furthest thing from pale and wounded Caleb, drowning in her bed. _

_ This Caleb was a walking weapon, a slash of dawn in a magnificently tailored charcoal suit and pale gold waistcoat, his shirtsleeves rolled neatly up, who moved with the confident grace of a predator with  little of his usual swagger. Orichalcum shone in the buckle of his belt and the spurs of his black boots. But his smile was the same, wide and insouciant, his eyes were honey-bright and kind, and he shone like the sun. _

_ “Figured I’d dream about you eventually, dove. Rather it weren’t here, though,” Caleb said, tiredness threaded through his voice, and dropped to sprawl out beside her. It was his essence woven through the dark of this place, veined through and beneath the darkened surfaces, threads of gold and sunlight waiting for a prospector’s hammer. _

_ “It doesn’t have to be. Caleb, we’re in a dream—together. Why does it look like this? Do you know what’s happening to you?” Lysistrata found his hand and slipped her fingers between his. He looked up at her and squeezed, gently, reassuring. _

_ “So you’re really here, then? Doll, I wouldn’t have ya stay for all the silver in the South. Get out while y’can.” He looked around at the red void as if seeing it anew and shrugged. “Figgur this is my debt finally paid.” _

_ “Caleb Mayberry. You had best not be trying to die on me again.”  She turned his hand over and traced the line of his arm where, back in her tent, his scars were. He had no scars here; his chin and lip unmarred and even the crooked line of his nose from an old break was straight here. “You were telling me about the last time.” _

_ “ _ Tryin _ ’ to? Naw, sweet. That was a long while back. I mostly don’t want to die anymore.” Caleb drew his arm back, out from under her fingers, and rubbed at his wrist. “But this fever’s summat else. Sol’s Fire, but I am tired.” _

_ “I am Chosen of Battles, Caleb. And I say this battle is not done. You can still fight. You can still win. If you  _ want _ to.” And these surroundings were depressing, no wonder. She gathered her will again and pressed it outwards. The red dark resisted; she had a moment to wonder how bad Caleb’s self-regard was before it broke, replaced in blurred waves by her own mental landscape of endless soft grasslands and clear blue skies. “And you’d break my heart if you didn’t.” _

_ Caleb sucked in a breath.  The lines of his body relaxed; little lines of pain vanishing from around his smile and replaced by genuine delight. “Well, I wouldn’t want t’do that.” _

_ “No, you wouldn’t.” Lys sighed and let him wrap an arm around her, softening into his tactile tendencies. Kallias had written they would not remember much of this once they woke; she hoped he was right. “I have a confession to make, Caleb.” _

_ “Mm?” _

_ “Before you met me, before we spent the night together... I had magic worked on us both. I did it to protect you from Myrmecia--from her workings you never even knew were there. To keep you from succumbing to her wiles. I was stacking the deck for you. But, there were some side effects.” _

_ “Side effects.” She heard the question he didn’t quite voice, in the rumbling undertones deep in his chest. _

_ “It tied our Fates together. Which… is complicated. And as I knew it would, it amplified my love for you. And it made you love me, for awhile.” _

_ “Darlin’, nothin’  _ made _ me love ya. I did the moment I set eyes on ya; how could I not? Hellfires, gal, I set my life in your hands after only a few minutes with you.” He ducked his head to meet her gaze and she had to look away from the earnestness in them. _

_ She poked him in the side and made him shy away out of ticklish reflex. “I know my business, Caleb. I know how the magic of the Loom, of the Fellowship, affects people: exalts and mortals alike. You may have been fond of me without it—and I have seen how generous you are with your affections, brightheart, it is one of the things I have adored about you from the beginning—but this magic… it is one of the strongest we know. I know what it did.” _

_ Caleb squeezed her shoulders and waited. _

_ “But the magic is broken now. I have read our fates in the stars. And I Love you, Caleb. I will always Love you, even when you no longer do, and I would have Loved you even without that charm. My heart was lost to you long before. And I need you to wake up, now. I need you to fight. I need you to win.” _

_ Caleb drew her into his arms and wrapped her tight for long, long moments, his head bent and hidden into the curve of her shoulder. Her eyes began to sting and blur with unshed tears; she closed them and laid her cheek against his shoulder. _

_ His voice was thick with emotion when he finally spoke, drawing back to look at her with his own complement of saltwater sparkling along his cheeks. “Lys. It’s been a damn long while since I’ve even felt  _ worthy _ of love, let alone what you’ve done for me. Are doin’ for me.” _

_ “You are, sunshine. You are. I have it on divine authority.” _

_ “I think I’m startin’ to believe it. But y’know, Lys— so’re you. Screw Fate—I do love ya—here, now. For always.  Will ya let me show you how much?” _

_ “Men!  One thing on your mind.” Lysistrata’s laugh startled even her. She pulled him over into the thick grass, accepting anything he cared to give with a lighter heart. _

_ “Starflower, the only thing on my mind is you.” Caleb leaned down and kissed her. _

* * *

  
  


The tent was quiet and dark when she woke, relaxed and meltingly happy, still tucked against Caleb. She remembered his smile, blue skies and bright sun painting gold into his hair from behind him, the lightness of his laughter.

He had shifted at some point, had turned towards her and hugged her in close, his scruff rough against her forehead, and no longer burned as hot. It was too dark to see if the streaks of green still reached up his neck, but she could feel the steady pulse of his heartbeat—even and strong and so very reassuring.

The desert winds had scrubbed the tent of scent, even the resin incense, leaving only clean sand and a hint of petrichor behind as she slid out of the bed to set the place to rights. With a freshly lit lamp, a square of imqaret, and Nara-O’s files a little later she settled back down and began to read.  The pages were filled with dry facts, reports from spirits and ghosts, from visions woven from the Loom of Fate of those days five years ago her gunslinger no longer remembered. She took them all and spun them into a tale. 

“Shall I tell you how it ended, Caleb? When the gunslinger thought all was lost, he did not give up. He did not fall into despair, he did not let the warlord execute him, there in the sand of his hometown. The gunslinger fought back, and then the power of the Sun came to him…”


End file.
